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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.
IANAL, but public domain software has several legal issues that open the originator of the code to legal liability. It may prove prudent to request that they license their code under the BSD or GPL licenses, which limit liability.
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.
Don't underestimate the bit of a license that goes something like this:
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
ARE DISCLAIMED.
Asking Infogrames to "public domain" their source code is, in my opinion, uninformed and irresponsible.
You know, even if the source code isn't released, Total Annihilation runs damn near perfectly under current WINE vintages.
I love this game, and I'm extremely glad I can run it in X. If you've never played it (and you run Linux), head to Electronics Boutique. You can find it on the shelf for about $4.99 last time I saw it. Then download, compile, and configure WINE, run TA setup, and voila! Runs fantastic.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
it is, the community, with very little help from cavedog (the now-defunct developers of TA). We can make the game itself do back flips without the soruce, we can add units that lose parts, over heat, transform, can be upgraded (GKX), we can make entire new races, we can even use proper 3d terran software to make maps (bryce and terragen), we can do more than Chris Taylor (creator of total annihilation) ever dreamed.
but the engine is old, and it is starting to lose it's appeal even to the guys who have been playing since it was released (4 years ago), it's running out of supply at stores, it's hard to find, and most people don't remember it, very little new blood flowing into the community (which is about 1000 people). anyways, i've never seen a commerical RTS released under an open-source liscense, I think it'd be very interesting to see the results.