Rogean and Nilbog are Breaking the Law!

[starkind]

I was thinking of doing a cool homebrew Gameboy style steam game in the veign of 1 EQ class and its epic cosmological journey from giant rats to planar riff Raffery for starter funds. Worried I'd get bought out or leepfrogged if toooo successful tho.

Would be pretty cool tho ��

[Jibartik]

If I draw mickey mouse with a dick on it Disney can force me to take it down.

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

No, I don't mean by re-creating an old game ... I mean by making modifications to the EQ Emulator source code, and not publishing those modifications.

Backstory: Project 1999 (AFAIK) is based off the EQ Emulator project, https://github.com/EQEmu/Server. As you can see at that link, that project has chosen the (absolutely terrible) GPL3 license to open source their code: https://github.com/EQEmu/Server/blob/master/LICENSE

That (again, terrible) license ... well I won't quote its legalese, but if you look at a summary of it on https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-ge...ense-v3-(gpl-3), you'll see:



In other words, unless P99 has ripped literally every last line of EQ Emulator code out ... because EQ Emulator picked Richard Stallman's (awful) GPL3 as their license ... P99 is legally required to publish their modifications to the EQ Emulator software.

Two important notes: 1) I am not a lawyer, just a copyright law hobbyist, and 2) the GPL does not in any way cover the database; they have no obligation to open source that.

But still ... thoughts?

P.S. For what it's worth I'm not a fan of this: I'd like to keep the game's secrets ... secret. But the GPL3 is, by design, unforgiving. If you use GPL3 source code in any way, even on a server, you are legally obligated to share modifications to that code (unlike the much saner GPL2).

You're confusing the GPL V3 with the AGPL. If you google the differences between these three licenses you'll see that tldrlegal botched its summary of the GPL V3.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Vivitron [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You're confusing the GPL V3 with the AGPL. If you google the differences between these three licenses you'll see that tldrlegal botched its summary of the GPL V3.

Yeah, actually I've been googling (and talking to an eq emu dev) and realized I made that mistake. I'd been told that GPL3 was toxic even to server apps (and that we needed to avoid it on the job ... for a server app), but now I have no idea why. Only AGPL closes the "server loophole".

I offer my sincere apologies for inadvertently slandering Rogean and Nilbog with my poor young lawyering. I clearly should have done more research first. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I am of course very thankful for everything they do here ... but even more so that they put up with idiots like me. Again, I'm very sorry for my poor judgment.

[Aussie]

I'll bite - I think alot of people in this thread need a history lesson.

P99 was formed well before the EQEmulator Project was published to Github, or the project was licensed to GPL3.

The code was originally distributed via eqemulator.net under creative commons.

[Shac]

yeah but which creative commons?

[Trexller]

uh am I really the only one who knows that Rogean owns EQEMU

its his email for the donations, he's an admin on eqemu

and nilbog is probably akkadius

[Naethyn]

GPL doesn't prevent anyone from modifying licensed code and offering it as whatever service it provides. They are breaking no license here.

[Jibartik]

yeah but what about my micky mouse pics.

[Swish]

I didn't read the first 10 pages but the servers are still up so gg OP.