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

Releasing to the "public domain"

[AirLace]

Releasing software to the "public domain" is dangerous and stupid.
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.

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