Spring RTS Engine

The reason is simple: IP.

It's been a good run, but I cannot justify my personally working for CA any longer. At this moment, CA is not legal. Maybe it will be legal someday, maybe it won't. But it is not legal right now, so I cannot justify working on it right now.

I realize the chance of direct legal action against me is fairly narrow. However, the potential damage is quite serious, especially as I do not have the resources to pursue a legal battle of any sort, and I'm not sure I trust the American legal system.

Perhaps equally serious is what the status of CA means for my work. Because CA is illegal, I do not feel free to show off my work to the world at large. I spend quite a bit of time working with Spring. I want to be able to take pride in my work, and I want my work free for anybody to talk about, distribute, and use. So long as my work is connected with an illegal project, these things cannot happen.

I am not willing to live with these things any longer.

As such, I am removing all TA IP from my system. I will no longer play, spec, or dev mods based on TA IP. In particular, I will no longer make any commits to CA's SVN.

This does not mean I didn't like working with the CA team--if I didn't like it, I would have left a long time ago. I don't harbor any ill will towards them, and I'm not asking anybody else to leave or not join CA. This is my personal decision only.

This also does not mean that I will stop working on widgets. Anybody can still make suggestions to me about widgets, as long as they do it politely and as a Spring user, not a *A user. And as always, I can't guarantee that I will do anything.

This does mean that my involvement with other Spring projects will increase (to the extent that real life allows, in any case). I definitely plan to continue working on Spring: 1944. Star Wars: Imperial Winter is also on the table; I will be sure to find out the exact situation as far as IP is concerned there. In general, if I like your project I may write you some CEG/COB/Lua, but don't count on it, and don't bug me about it if I don't know you.

Here's to breaking TA IP's 95%+ hold on Spring player minutes.

+1 hope TA IP kicks the bucket soon

shame tho

Sad to hear it. I've just been really getting into CA.

Edit: while IW has the de-facto nod from Lucasfilm (they don't mind fan projects that just use the setting, not the characters), isn't it in legally murky water as well? S44 is in the clear except that some of their weapons and units could be questionable if the companies that made that hardware is still around - remember how Counterstrike had to rename all their guns?

Really, the large projects that seem legally free-and-clear are original-content projects like PURE and EE... and in both of those cases the author has retained many of the rights for themselves.

That leaves smaller projects like KP.

i'm 50% and 50% :)

here's hoping that you concentrating on those free as in speech projects will actually mean they're released before i'm retired

This is so true.
A dev really is very limited when working on an illegal project.
good luck with future work,SWIW and S44 look mighty promising and anything allowing them to release their games faster is awesome.

^ guy,your smiley is broken.

I am concerned as to why it was such a issue that it not only required you remove yourself from the team but do so publicly? What prompted such a drastic action? I can understand personal moral conflict as I have my own about spring and ta's current connection.

:x :!: :P :twisted: :? :shock: :-) :-) :oops: :o :arrow: :|
HOW DID I DO IT YAN!?!?!

5/10 on the gota scale.
You got more than you should have,cause of the awesome CAPS LOCK.

Not even playing?

smoth wrote:I am concerned as to why it was such a issue that it not only required you remove yourself from the team but do so publicly? What prompted such a drastic action? I can understand personal moral conflict as I have my own about spring and ta's current connection.

Maybe as an announcement that he's no longer available for recruitment on projects that use TA IP?

I am also 50% and 50% :)

CA is a great mod and an leads the Spring community in extending spring via lua. On the other hand, S44 loves its zerggin time.

AH! I see, I misunderstood. Well good luck in future endeavors zergin'

Wow. Fail

Why do I sense a C&D echo in that message.

It's good that you're sticking with your principals, I don't really get the purpose of the open letter however.

That makes me sad

And we only have like 20 models to go, few textures and sounds..

only 20 models until he can return then ^^

Less models to go if people would stop whining about the alternate stumpy model in the concept factory

This makes me wish i could make 3d models >.<

imbaczek wrote:only 20 models until he can return then ^^

Not...exactly. IANAL, but an "original" work that is derived from someone else's work is said to be infringing. See Wikipedia article on derivative work :

[T]he owner of copyright under [17 U.S.C. § 106] has the exclusive rights ... to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work

Thus, most sorts of "fan art" (and this is) are on shaky legal ground (I'm not even going to call it "uncertain"). Not making money from CA is going to help in any legal disputes, but that isn't always enough to keep the rabid corporate lawyers away. Given that Infogrames may, in fact, be relaunching key Atari titles like Total Annihilation, I wouldn't blame anyone for choosing to publicly denounce all the *A mods we've got around here.

IW is committed to ensuring all it's produced work is original, or from appropriately licensed sources. This commitment has increased our workload severalfold (for example, producing our own voice acks rather then ripping them from the many Star Wars games), but we have specifically stuck to it to ensure that our game does not enter into any murky legal water.

In terms of using the 'Star Wars' IP, while theoretically it is a legal grey area, in reality I think it is pretty clear that Lucasarts considers the Star Wars name to be a freely accessible canon, and has no problems with people exploring and creating material for this universe, as long as they are not clearly in breach of any copyright laws (Such as redistributing copyrighted content like music or vocals etc), and are not earning any money from the work.

As a testament to this is the existence of innumerable works of fan-fiction for Star Wars, and more specifically relevant, the many Star Wars mods that exist for pretty much every moddable game out there - many of which (unlike IW) were in direct competition with lucasarts products, and none of which received C&D letters. The most obvious example of this being the First Strike mod for the battlefield series, which was in direct competition (And arguably significantly better than) lucasarts Star Wars Battlefront.

(in summary: NooooOoo! Don't go zerggin! We need you for pretty explosions!)