Free The TA Source Code

JFL writes " A petition to request that the Total Annihilation source code's current owner, Infogrames, release the code into the public domain is currently in full swing over at the French site TA Forever. " I recently picked up TA again, and played around with it - while the graphics are looking a bit dated, the design for the system is great - a very extensible design system, and one that you could build some interesting environments on top of. The use of height is something that was, and to a certain extent, still far ahead of other RTS ^? games.

Comments

Deadline

[hogsback]

The TA site says the deadliine for the petition was 30th December 2001.

Oops.

But there are a couple big "IF"s.

[uncle isaac]

My last job was as a high-level manager at a well-known game company, and I can tell you that there are a few simple economic forces that keep most of the old, discontinued games in closed source format forever. Consider the following:

• The manufacturers have a nonexistent economic incentive to give away their work for free. If you look at it from their viewpoint, you will see that the best they can do is to not lose money from the proposition.
• Most software houses have licensed proprietary pieces of code or business processes from other companies, and they did not pay for the right of unlimited distribution. A vendor notorious for continuing this practice, then blaming the fact that its main product is still completely closed source, is Sun.
• Companies know that they can quickly gain popularity amongst open source supporters by releasing their code, so this often provides an impetus as it could lead to better sales for newer products from the resultant goodwill.
• Giving old products away to the general public has certain specific and often harmful tax consequences. Effectively the companies are declaring the value of their goods to be zero, which keeps them from using the standard 20-year depreciation chart to deal with unsold inventory. In a nutshell, this means that there are huge tax benefits to not releasing old software as open source.
• And lastly, code reuse is rampant because of the short development cycle of most games. I have seen code from Apple II games from 1987 show up in brand new product releases in 2001. Giving your code away gives your competitors an edge, and nobody wants to do that.

As futile as it may sound, it is important for us all to contact our federal representatives and urge them to provide tax credits to companies when they release open source software. That would be a very good way to swing the economic incentives in our favor, and possibly even help out struggling OSS companies like Caldera and SGI.

uncle isaac

OK guys..to answer all the questions

[Gamefreak]

Hello. I'm Gamefreak from www.tauniverse.com After looking through here I've noticed that many people wonder why we want this source code? After all, who still plays TA? Who still plays TA? Thousands of people. After over 4 long years we still remain one of the largest RTS communities. There are tons of large TA supersites such as TA Universe ( www.tauniverse.com ), Planet Annihilation ( www.planetannihilation.com ), Annihilated ( www.annihilated.com ), TA Designers ( www.tadesigners.com ), Ultimate-Strategy ( www.ultimate-strategy.com ), TAMEC ( www.tamec.net ), and many more. Along with these sites are tons of hosted sites. TAU and PA alone host at least 60 sites, and there are many other TA sites independent from those mentioned above. You don't think anything's happening in the community though do you? Check the news at TA Universe or PA! We still have more news every day than brand new popular games that just came out! We want this source code because we have accomplished more than probably any other RTS community. After making over 1000 new fully 3D scripted units, over 5000 maps (at least), probably over 10 full races (who else can make races?), tons of third party programs and mods and so on, we are getting bored and want to alter the game engine itself. Our community has gone so far that we are making a full length TA movie at Annihilation Studios, a first person shooter in the TA world (called TA: Close Quarters), and the third party sequel to TA, TA: Flashback. TA:F will be fully 3D and so on, and it is also being made by Annihilation Studios. Just recently Infogrames opened up a TA forum for us (who knows why?), apparently after finally noticing we survived and thrived even after they closed down Cavedog and left us to die. (whoever claims he is a former infogrames worker is wrong, I've had TA since october 1997 and I know for a fact that cavedog was NOT dead when infogrames acquired GT). Anyway...anyone who still plays TA is encouraged to come to the above sites and post on all our forums, esp. TA Universe, the biggest one (still bigger than most RTS fan forums, believe it or not. Several hundred thousand posts and several thousand users..).