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Re: Fwd: [FSF] Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming

 

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Arc Riley <arcriley@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Unless something has changed with this that I'm not aware of, this is
> nothing to cheer about.
>
> Ryzom is wholly locked into a proprietary environment and proprietary
> toolchain - all the artistic material requires proprietary source to edit
> and "compile" (and thus can never comply with the GPL), the client is locked
> into Microsoft's DirectMedia framework - most notably DirectX instead of
> OpenGL, so you will likely never see this being played on an Ubuntu desktop.
>
> Who is volunteering to rewrite their game engine from scratch to get it
> running with OpenGL, OpenAL, GStreamer, etc?  Who is volunteering to add
> features to Blender to support the features of their proprietary media
> formats?  Who's going to break the news to Peter Brown that the FSF just
> wasted a lot of time and money to "liberate" a proprietary game that will
> never run on a free desktop?

It's a step. Free software should not only exist on GNU/Linux systems,
rather every platform we can provide.

Launchpad was nonfree for a while. We still used it for Ubuntu
development. It's all about small steps. All things in due time, I
think.


>
>
> On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Danny Piccirillo
> <danny.piccirillo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Peter Brown <info@xxxxxxx>
>> Date: Thu, May 6, 2010 at 08:01
>> Subject: [FSF] Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming
>> To: info-fsf@xxxxxxx, info-press@xxxxxxx
>>
>>
>> Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming--Ryzom Announces Full Release of
>> Source Code and Artwork, and a Partnership with the Free Software
>> Foundation to Host a Repository of the Game's Artistic Assets.
>>
>> Press release: http://dev.ryzom.com/news/13 and at
>> http://www.fsf.org/news/free-ryzom-1
>>
>>
>> By Brett Smith - FSF Licensing Compliance Engineer
>>
>> Ryzom is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG),
>> where players work together to explore a fantasy world and set out on
>> various quests. Today, the Ryzom team has released the game as free
>> software: both the client and server programs have been released under
>> the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, while its models,
>> textures, and other art are covered by CC-BY-SA 3.0.
>>
>> This release is probably the single-biggest contribution to free
>> software games yet. If you missed it, check out the press release. We're
>> thankful to the Ryzom team for making this release, and excited about
>> the possibilities it presents to all free software games. The code is
>> tested and proven, having run the Ryzom game since 2004, and the
>> art—more than 13 gigabytes of data—can be adapted and used in other
>> games. This release can provide a lot of new resources and energy for
>> free software game development.
>>
>> Since we're expecting people to have a lot of interest in this release,
>> we wanted to provide some detailed information up-front about exactly
>> what has and has not been released, and suggestions for ways developers
>> can contribute to the project effectively.
>>
>> All of the code necessary to run both the client and server software has
>> been released under AGPLv3. If you want to play on the official Ryzom
>> server today, you can do that using only free software. Modified clients
>> will not be allowed to connect to the official server, but a testing
>> server is available to try them out.
>>
>> If you want to run your own server for the game, you have the software
>> to do that, but you won't really have any world data—information about
>> geography, special places, characters, quests, items, and so on—to run
>> it with. Winch Gate Properties, the company that currently holds the
>> copyright for all game materials and runs the official server, has
>> decided not to release that data, to avoid causing disruption for their
>> current player community. People who want to run their own server will
>> need to develop their own world to do so—only a small test world comes
>> with the code.
>>
>> Unfortunately, that development can't be done with free software,
>> because most of the world creation process depends on proprietary 3-D
>> modeling software. Work is already underway to eliminate those
>> dependencies and use free software alternatives like Blender. This is
>> the next big task that needs to be done to make Ryzom even more useful
>> to the free software community, so if you'd like to help, please see the
>> project page for more information. In the meantime, the server code may
>> be adapted for other games.
>>
>> Art files from the game, including both textures and 3-D models, have
>> been released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. The FSF is helping distribute these
>> files by hosting a mirror for the Ryzom media server. You can use these
>> files in other games, software, artistic works—anywhere, really—under
>> the terms of that license. Music and sound effects are not being
>> released today because Winch Gate does not have the legal rights to do
>> so, but they are trying to find an arrangement that will see these files
>> released under a free license as well.
>>
>> Today's release offers free software developers a lot of opportunities,
>> both to contribute to Ryzom and to improve other software. If you see a
>> project that you'd like to see benefit, please get involved! For more
>> information about this release, including downloads and more projects
>> underway, please visit the Ryzom team's page.
>>
>> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/ryzom-free-software
>>
>> info-fsf mailing list
>> info-fsf@xxxxxxx
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/info-fsf
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> .danny
>>
>> ☮♥Ⓐ - http://www.google.com/profiles/danny.piccirillo
>> Every (in)decision matters.
>>
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