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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.
TA must have some very clever code to perform as well as it did on machines of its day, but that's nothing some open source developers working their asses off 12 hours a day can't do -- you can bet that's minimum the amount of work that Cavedog put into TA. It's getting artists to make the keen looking units, terrain, and explosions. It's getting a composer to write a soundtrack and a full symphony orchestra to perform it. OSS games tend to look and sound like ass because it's precisely the aesthetic appeal of the game that often gets dismissed as mere fluff -- forgetting that in the big picture, games themselves are mere fluff.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I have never heard of someone being successfully sued for a piece of public domain software being poor quality, without an explicit warranty, and I've looked pretty hard.
Can anyone provide a single example?
This is brought up over and over again as a reason not to release code into the public domain, but I've never seen any evidence that a disclaimer sent along with the initial release of public domain software is any less valid than one included in a licence such as the GPL. I believe it's a bit of licence folklore.
First thing: it is widely accepted that you don't need to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, only to distribute it. You don't even have to read it. That means you don't have to see or agree to any disclaimer of warranty.
Similarly, the end users of BSD or X type licenses don't have to see or agree to the terms. Under copyright law, having legally obtained a copy of software, by default you have the right to run it and back it up. Shrink wrap and click-through licenses are both somewhat legally shaky, but still a lot stronger than something you don't even see unless you look for it.
Furthermore, a case could be made that a copyright holder is more likely to be held responsible for defects in his work than a contributor to the public domain. Blanket disclaimers of warranty, especially tucked quietly away in a corner of a contract (especially one presented as "standard" or a mere formality, and not offering the opportunity to negociate), and in strong contrast to public claims, fall somewhere between weak and completely invalid.
Hell, the GPL still hasn't ever been tested in court. There are reasons to believe that releasing software under the GPL is putting it in the public domain, and it is just one test case away from being treated as such.
Picking a licence causes problems, too. The most important one is licence incompatibility: choose one, and you prevent the code from being used in projects using an incompatible licence, while public domain code can be included in projects using any licence I've heard of.
If the problem of liability is not a real one, then public domain is the simplest, easiest to understand, most reliable way to give people the full free use of your code.
Although I can't go into details (still under NDA after 6 years technically), we got bitten by this at a large software house not so long ago. Basically, some of our examples in the documentation were marked as "public domain" software and a third party began to redistribute the examples in binary form with added graphical interfaces. It turned out of the developers of this GUI had written his code on another company's time, and that company decided to sue us. Since there was no limitation of liability in our distributed source code, our lawyers had a harder time justifying our position.
You left out the most crucial part: What was their complaint? It doesn't sound like it had anything to do with merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or any sort of implied warranty.
It sounds to me a lot more like an accusation of your company being involved in the unauthorized use of this worker's paid time.
NDA or not, if you're not willing to specify enough details to show whether and how your example is relevant, you shouldn't have brought it up. I think you're using your NDA as an excuse to make vague references to a case that doesn't apply.