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FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
Blizzard is not responsible for this, I'm 100% sure this is Blizzards parent company, who owns Blizzard, Universal or one of those big Music/Media companies who is part of the RIAA.
This is an RIAA/MPAA thing. FreeCraft will live on, they cant stop it just like Unix owners cant stop Linux.
I see it like this, this gives FreeCraft more publicity, the codes already out, so go ahead and make martyrs of them. Go ahead Universal or whichever french company owns them
sue them, lock the developers up, please, do us all a favor and do it, all you will do is bring open source to the masses, cause hundreds of thousands of people to work on the code who didnt even know about it before, and start a whole Linux game development movement.
Didnt you learn from Gnutella?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You cannot just key off someone else's name like that. If your game is good, invent your own name and identity. Knock-off 'free' versions of commercial products are unimaginative, and a business *must* protect its trademarks, or it loses them.
why not just change the name?
Blizzard doesn't hold the rights to the whole RTS genre, if that was the case then C&C and AoE and lots of others would be in trouble..
I can't feel too sorry for the FreeCraft people. Open source projects need to think of more creative and original names instead of just ripping off someone else's name and making a "clever" modification
~~~
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Vivendi Universal is the owner of Blizzard. Vivendi Universal hates the free software movement, why? Because its assosiated with the Mp3/FileSharing movement.
I think people need to consider certsain media companies to be a threat to open source, and a threat to our personal fair use rights, Vivendi Universal is one of these companies.
Microsoft takes alot of heat, but I think even more heat should be given to companies like Vivendi Universal who sue anyone and everyone who is a threat to their monopoly power and business.
They sue file sharing companies who create new ways of distributing music, they sue open source companies who create new ways to play games, they will sue you and I if we use these networks, even if they dont know why we are using them.
Its not about piracy anymore, its about competition, if they cant own all the code, and all the distribution companies, they sue.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Sorry if this is a stupid question--but which one of these was the open source game, and which were the Blizzard games? I can't ever keep them straight.
What did they expect? It's like starting a company called 'Appel' to sell a photo editing prodocut called 'ifoto'.
Mod point free since 2001
C'mon guys, here's where you have the advantage because you can do something that big-shot software companies can't. Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game. re-release it as a "different game" and under a different company logo if you have to.
the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.
fly like a butterfly....
.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Yep, here it comes. I'll cease and desist downloading this right now, of course...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Be kind to it, only fetch if you're going to do something useful with the code. Some of the real mirror sites are still up (wayback is your friend) and may be faster if you're in the USA or Europe. Of course, if you're hitting my ISP from WAIX then ArachNet won't care about bytes, so go for it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Perhaps if you spent some of this money buying or donating to Freecraft not only would we have better games, we'd have free games. Free games would hurt Vivendi Universal and Blizzard more than anything else. Free Games that are good would kill them.
We need to set up a way to support development of games, perhaps a transgaming style game development company, where people subscribe, vote on the type of game they want and its features, and then the coders code it out.
They'd only have to charge 5$ a month, theres plenty of open source game engines to use, they'd only need to hire artists, and do some coding.
Open source game development means once one game is done they'd never need to reinvent the wheel, this means we could have higher quality Open Source games than the current game industry simply because everyone would use the best engine and improve on it instead of everyone writing or licensing their own.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Transgaming is doing pretty good at version 3.1, they have allowed hundreds of games to be ported to Linux within a matter of years. Now I think its time for a company to step up and do a Linux game development setup, and not like what Loki did, but in a transgaming style payment setup.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
I'd subscribe to a FreeCraft subscription if there was a company out there willing to transfer my money, or if FreeCraft becomes a company and sets it all up. If they make a good game, I keep subscribed to them and if their game sucks I can subscribe to more established game development people who are better.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Well, um, yeah, but... shut up!
In many ways, it seems like a reasonable thing for Blizzard to do -- they're protecting their investments and working (in their eyes) to do what is best for their company, their employees, private investors, etc.
I don't completely agree with the actions taken by either side, mind you.
First, the Freecraft project probably shouldn't have tried to so closely mimic Starcraft in name and graphics. Surely, the developers MUST have realized that something like this was bound to happen, especially given Blizzard's propensity for shutting down free "stuff" (e.g., bnetd servers). In the very least, they should have called the project something different.
Second, while I'm not a lawyer, I would think it reasonable for the project to open itself back up again under a different name (and after changing its races names, graphics, or whatever else Blizzard thinks might be infringing on their rights). The underlying engine is sound, and it wouldn't take long for the developers to resurrect it, free of legal issues.
Third, I think that Blizzard should have taken the stance of warning the project developers first (e.g., "advising" them to change names) before resorting to their big guns. But, again, I'm not a lawyer (and not well versed in such contemptable American corporate law).
Finally, I would suggest the following: if you disagree with Blizzard's actions, don't buy Blizzard products. I, for one, am not overly surprised, and am not "incensed" by Blizzard's actions. I believe Blizzard to have acted reasonably given the circumstances, though I think that their legal actions could have been executed more cleanly.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a games programmer...
Why didn't the project team just:
1) Change the name of the project, removing the source of the confusion with the Blizzard titles
then
2) Remove anything which looked like it might directly infringe on Blizzard's IP (I'm guessing there's things like similar artwork here, since gameplay mechanics cannot be copyrighted).
This would leave the cease-and-desist without a legal leg to stand on, as the grounds it had been sent under were no longer valid. After all, plenty of people out there clone other games, it looks like these guys just cloned *Craft a bit too closely and have annoyed someone with a lawyer...
Game dev and music blog
Some personal projects I may have to rethink:
BarCraft - Can you restore the broken supply line of ale for the underaged teens lurking in the carpark outside?
DartCraft - The expansion pack for BarCraft. It's RTS darts, with uh... resources and stuff.
ParCraft - Play 18 holes of golf while repelling invading loons in golf buggies.
FarCraft - Like a regular RTS, but it'll take 3 and a half days to cross the map.
RarCraft - You have to play with all game data (gfx, sound, etc) still in compressed form.
LoreCraft - Get the Law School upgrade on your Fortress to produce a phalanx of patent-happy lawyers.
BoreCraft - The only unit is a peasant. Buy the expansion for female peasants!
There are? I can think of CrystalSpace, and Quake II as the only decent open-source FPS engines (and none of them is that good, compared to the likes of DoomIII, HL2, Halo2, etc), and Freecraft was the only decent RTS engine. Is there some secret 31337 open-source engine repository I'm missing out on?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Only an idiot would start a project to produce a RTS with a name that's only a few letters away from an established line of RTS games.
I have ZERO sympathy for these people. It takes about 30 seconds to realize that maybe the name + genre was a bad idea. But hey we get folks starting projects all the time based on TV shows without permission. Then they come and cry months into the dev cycle when they get a C&D.
Coyboy Neal & Co, how would you feel if YOU were Blizzard and someone was trying to ride on the coattails of the brand you worked your ass off to build?
..for Vivendi to go after OSS which's in competition with some of their products... story here
Even if in the case of Freecraft, it doesn't seem as they were chalenging Blizzard's market or something...
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
happypenguin.org is struggling to come to terms with Slashdots own form of Cease and Desist :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
I made some very minor contributions to this a couple years ago; it's pretty much playable these days.
:(
OTOH, I always thought it would have made more sense to build it as a generic engine, with at least one totally original theme, than a 100% clone of Warcraft mechanics. (In fairness, I think the plan was to move in that direction eventually).
But like a lot of these, probably 70% of the code was written by one guy, I think, so if they've chased him off the project is toast.
Will you all remember this when the next big blizzard game comes out? Or will you all just run to the store to buy it, just like Warcraft 3?
I am not a lawyer, but on the surface this case looks similar to one the Supreme Court just decided recently in which Victoria's Secret sued a sex-toy company called Victor's Secret for trademark infringement because of the soundalike name. Victoria lost---the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name. The CBS news story is here.
This post is dedicated to all of those
Today is Saturday, and they haven't released a game/major patch in two weeks, so we hate Blizzard. Also, the time this was posted was well before 1:00 p.m., so this is BAD news. And this is Slashdot, I shouldn't have to remind you that we have to defend open source against closed source!
Me and my friends, who have bought every game Blizzard has produced (all the way back to Blackthorne/Lost Vikings), use PVPGN. Why? Because its nice to host your own servers, to have your own games, to not have to worry about who is on there, to have total control. It's a nice thing to have, and to play around with.
Of course blizzard shut it down, because you don't need an "official" key to use it. The honor system has become suprisingly worthless nowadays.
Galactic Civilizations decided to (*gasp*) TRUST their customers and not put SafeDisc or any other type of copy protection on the install discs. A lot of people have problems with these types of anti-piracy methods and generally it just hurts your end user, not that pirates who can get around it with various cracks/hacks/or cd copying programs. Its this kind of trust who now, unfortunately, seems to the be the odd man out. id software did the same thing with Quake3. It was either the first or second patch that took out the cd check, because it annoyed the user more than it actually helped anti-piracy.
I think the worst part is that Blizzard now requires you to buy a "gaming site license" for any gaming venue in which you charge a fee to enter, even if every user has their own, official, bought and paid for copy. This is just sad. You don't see Valve having a fit over Counter Strike players and their LAN habits, yet Blizzard needs more and more cash for reasons that just don't make sense.
Here's the irony: Blizzard is owned by an asshole, very profit-driven company (Vivendi International, AFAIK). The developers have generally been very cool, and sometimes even listen to the community at large (they ignored War3 beta testers, but seemed to actually listen when I participated in the Frozen Throne beta). Even though they might be great people who make some really nice games, this is like PR hell. Give the gamers something great, then stab them in the back once you have their money.
They can't cry "we're just a small developer!" anymore. Not with millions upon millions of sales, and huge development houses around the country.
I say screw this "Don't blame Blizzard, they've got a bad parent company." No, if the Blizzard heads really wanted to dig their feet into the dirt and stand their ground, they would. If they got fired, and worked the press releases well enough, they would start another gaming company and all those brilliant minds would go there, instead of suffering through this idiocy in the name of cash.
Sigh. Dare to dream, folks.
Is it just me? or is freecraft a blatant ripoff of warcraft. I saw a screenshot that could have come from warcraft. Little green orcs, harvesting gold and lumbar. There was even the building with the telescope in it. It's not hard to start a computer company, it's just hard to start a company called "Mikrosoft".
Make up your own damn game. Don't remake someone else's.
FreeCraft was a threat, a threat to their trademark. If you don't defend your trademarks, then you stand to lose them. Thats why you can't open a small coffee shop and call it Starbucks, or a courier service called FedEx.
Its called "dilution" when the infringing title is similar. There was a famous case where FedEx sued a NY State coffee shop called FederalExpresso for trademark dilution. I think they won, (That was a far-fetched case, obviously).
IANAL, but I think the law requires them to do this. I doubt they can stop FreeCraft from changing their name and continuing development though.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Perhaps if you spent some of this money buying or donating to Freecraft not only would we have better games, we'd have free games. Free games would hurt Vivendi Universal and Blizzard more than anything else. Free Games that are good would kill them.
Why, exactly, does the purpose of supporting a game/company need to be to hurt and kill another?
Even if you hate them personally, or they (or their parent company, more likely) do nasty things sometimes, admit it- Blizzard makes kickass games that LOTS of people love. Starcraft is 5 years old, and yet there's still around 10,000 people playing it on Battle.net at any given time.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Starcraft Battle Chest: $20
Diablo II: $20 each for the main game and expansion.
Warcraft II: $11.99
Battle.net: Completely free.
Yep, they're sure being greedy alright.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
So you're saying that games without monthly fees are outdated? Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough monthly fees to pay already.
yes, The nebula device from
http://www.radonlabs.de/
I don't know why this marvelous engine hasn't caught the attention of the slashcrew yet. But it's all I ever wanted in an engine. Professional games that even have hit the shelves have already been made.
Check it out. radon labs deserves "our" support
Well, there's Ogre. A pretty nice, extendable, 3D engine.
How about "FreakRaft"? Screw 'em!
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Theres dozens, theres a few that are pretty good, no they arent as good as Doom3(until ID releases the source) or Turbines engine, but they dont have to be, they just have to be good enough to make PS2 quality games.
Most of these games would look better than anything on the PS2. There is an open source game repository but are you willing to donate money to make these games good? Or will you complain about quality when you dont pay?
Well here are some engines.
Genesis3d
Nooface
WorldForge
Reality FactoryM
Ogre
Obsidian
More at LinuxGames
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
"Others steal toilet paper from their work place, others steal ideas from popular games. Toilet paper thiefs go to Hell, idea thiefs to sales charts, especially if they are as good as Blizzard with Warcraft"
Obviously, the game before Warcraft was Dune II from Westwood.
Why, exactly, does the purpose of supporting a -game/company need to be to hurt and kill another?
Although, I sniped out what you were refering to, I think you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself, why does Blizzard need to "hurt" FreeCraft. And why did they wait so long!? FreeCraft didn't harm anyone. Blizzard did.
admit it- Blizzard makes kickass games that LOTS of people love.
But ask yourself, how much longer until they reach the point of diminishing return, by pissing off the very folks that buy their products. WC3 was a piece of bloated buggy crap. (wouldn't even install correctly on two different boxes) And that was $50.00 a pop at COSTCO! The support was crap, and then battle.net won't let you logon (even with the right password.) They have too god damn much personal information about those using Bnet. They Killed the Open Source Version of BNet Servers. That pissed more people off.
Now they killed FreeCraft, yet pissing even more folks off, what next? Who are their lawyers going to screw next? What products will they ruin next.
Love Music? Got a Band? Are you a Label? http://garageradio.com
When should we expect to hear about Netcraft being sued?
Obviously, netcraft is Blizzard's next hit, wherein the few remaining human loyalists valiantly defend their networks from the hordes of Zerg viruses. Those survey folks are just confusing people.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
or has everyone forgotten about the Open Source alternative to battlenet?
That's why I'm STILL not buying Blizzard anything.
BTW, does no one get the cocaine reference in 'Blizzard"?
That was the origin of 'Blizzard of Ozz', the insiration for their name.
Buncha damn powderheads.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
This wasn't supposed to be the ideal of Open Source -- it's not to make mediocre and blatant copies of commerical products, complete with a "punny" name like FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Lindows or ...
We're supposed to be making better, faster, original stuff. Either just plain better (compare the GNU Unix tools against the Solaris versions) or new and better, leading edge stuff like emacs (which was amazing when it came out; although I prefer Vim :-), perl, tcl, python, ...
And, damn it, pick a name that doesn't attempt to ride the coat tails of the commercial version so you get free marketing name association. If you're too lazy to market it yourself than you deserve to be ceased and desisted.
Yeah, now only the people with original ideas will be able to compete! What a crock of shit!
Seriously, will OSS ever produce an original idea, or will it all be about copycat-ism?
--sdem
Aren't you overestimating the influence of Slashdot just a tad? The overwhelming majority of Blizzards customers don't even know Slashdot exists and even the ones who do don't always agree.
Take me for example. I'm a Blizzard customer and a Slashdot user. But I hardly ever agree with the Slashdot groupthink. I see nothing wrong with Blizzard's actions today and will remain a customer for years to come.
Why?
Because I like GOOD video games and Blizzard makes em. I don't want to have to wait 2 to 3 years for an open source half-assed equivalent to come out. Some of the very BEST open source games look like something that was first introduced 5 years ago. And before anyone goes off on a rant about how GOOD games don't always need the best graphics well I agree. But that doesn't mean I also want to be a second-class citizen on the video gaming front.
For the love of GAWD can't you pedantic nerdy geeks keep politics out of ONE realm of your lives? Folks just want to play games not stand on idealogical grounds for or against something. Whatever happened to just appreciating good work without an alterior motive?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
How is this possible? Heres how, CODE REUSE.
Why do I have the sneaky feeling that this code reuse on a large scale would also result in about 2000 games that are all pretty much the same, each being just a slightly different version of the same game, going by the personal vision of each lead developer?
Now I'm not saying that the current commercial model is at all successful in making original games (practically everything is either an FPS, an RTS, or a graphical mud - though there's the odd exception), but it seems to me that code reuse would only result in games that all look and feel the same.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
On the surface, this is really nothing alike. On one hand, we have a company making sex toys, with a name sounding like a company that makes underwear. (I'll grant there could be some overlap, but they are basically distinct industries). On the other hand, we have a real-time strategy game with a very similar name to an established family of RTS games.
Any judge who found that there wasn't a possibilty of confusion ("Sweet, Blizzard released a new *Craft game!") would have to be insane.
I was going to mod you down, however, I decided to waste my chance to moderate this interesting discussion, in order to correct you.
The text that you bolded does not imply theft. "the additional media packs" have been designed independently by the FreeCraft project. The engine has also been written by them. So, the entire bundle FreeCraft + FCMP is not 100% property of FreeCraft.
The only issues are issues of whether making software clones is allowed and improper naming. There is no theft involved.
If clones are not allowed, then say goodbye to projects like xpde, scummvm, samba and even wine. I think Blizzard went way over their line here...Can the FSF attorneys help out in this case?
A new on-line realtime strategy game from the makers of...um...food.
Build a cheesy empire with Velveeta! Sail into battle with ChipsAhoy! Or tear down your opponent's battlements with an oreo trebuchet!
Play as one of four exciting new races: Macaroni&Cheese eaters, The Salad Dressing-ites, StoveTop Stuffers, or People of the Jell-o!
WarKraft
who's up for doing the box-art?
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
It's a wonder FreeCiv hasn't got a C&D yet -- the web site even proclaims, "'Cause civilization should be free". If it ever gets up to speed, Firaxis' lawyers would be around with a polite, "Stop it, or else..." letter.
With profound apologies to whomsoever this sig originally belonged.
... that Blizzard actually makes quality games - they would be easier to hate if they were also incompetent (like say, Westwood)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
IIRC the Half-Life engine was based on licenced Quake 2 code.
I'm the first person to opt-out of any profiling, *except* when it is by a company that I feel I can trust won't abuse my information by selling it on or direct marketing to me. Blizzard is one of those companies that I feel I can trust since they have consistently produced the best games in the genres (IMHO, yours may differ), have innovated, and have provided high quality, always on, high bandwidth BattleNet servers.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
We run this game all the time, and here's how it goes. For this game to be worth anything you HAVE to own one of the WarCraft II cds. Then once you have one of the cds you use a tool for the game that extracts the maps, graphics, and scenarios from the WarCraft II cd and skins the game to make it look and play very much like the original WarCraft II. I don't see why Blizzard has a problem w/ this considering the original WarCraft II doesn't work in many of the windows operating systems, and people still have to buy the WarCraft II cds from Blizzard. So those people using unsupported operating systems gets to play, and Blizzard gets to sell more of it's game...how is this a problem.
Also this game adds a lot of features beyond WarCraft II. There are a few additions to the actual game, like the ability to pump out critters from farms, but they have also dropped the original warcraft II network system(that involved using ipx and then kali to emulate tcp/ip) and gone straight to tcp/ip. The game also allows more people for network play, from the original 8 to now 16 and the map size has gone from 256x256 up to a possible 2048x2048.
We tried for quite a while to get WarCraft II working on bootable dos cds so that we could run our operating systems of choice and then boot up a cd to play warcraft, but dos netcard drivers suck. This is the only way we could easily set up WarCraft II for network play, and yes we own many copys of WarCraft II and the expansions.
It's sad to see Blizzard attacking such a good program. I hope that the people behind freecraft just put their foot down, don't rename the damn thing and just keep doing what they do well and contribute more code to the project. If worse does come to worse though they could just rename the game and actually get some usable artwork. Either way, when Blizzard shutdown bnetd i said I would never buy another Blizzard product, and I haven't...now I'm to the point where I just want to take MY WarCraft II cd, make an iso, and put it up on kazaa or gnutella....which I think I'll go do.
Sorry but blizzard isn't going to be hurt by anything they do. You may not like the company but very few people care enough about the issues to actually inconvenience themselves. They will continue to by blizzard products just like they continue to buy music from these companies. When was the last time you bought a CD or a game associated with universal? When large companies put out good products they can do what ever they want because people just want to play that new cool game.If they read slashdot will they care? No, because they know that there market share is secure. People like you are me do not decide their success. Its the masses of people who are driven not by the ills of the world but their own desire to have fun and have conveniences.
Well.
If companies, expecially media companies, aren't mature enough to understand that by driving people underground they are telling people not to come back on the surface again (Joe: "oooh: thankz to the undergroundz scene I can have all the divx movies that I want, why should I come back to the surface to buy a legitimate copy of Warcraft: The Movie?") let them be.
These action hurt us, I agree, but these actions hurt THEM as well.
Do you remember where the IT world was going before Linux come along? Unix was going to die and everyone was going to buy Windows on their servers, and former major players like Unisys were abandoning Unix. Thanks to Linux the Unix market got a lot of fresh techies who underlined the greatness of that platform on the whole.
If thanks Sco linux disappears underground, then Sco will get back to the distruction as it was happening years ago (Sco was going to die anyway, her inferior Unix was too inferior to compete with *BSD, let alone with other commercial unices). Yeah, and the IT world will be all Bill-centered.
The freecraft people being pissed off, is, on the whole, a group of people which will deny to enter the videogame market with their talent, mostly since they will not go and face an interview at a media company saying "Yeah, and we were banished to the underground by blizzard because our FreeCraft stomped on their IP". They would rather enter other jobs, maybe as cooks. Yes, people from Blizzard will not find talented programmers, people will not buy their videogames (they will rather warez them since they will be crappier than Commodore 64 games), but you know what will happen? They will find the best meals at the restaurant in front of their offices. More cooks, more competition, more quality in the restaurants.
This is not anymore 1990's where you could be asked to do the R-Type conversion for the Amiga, after being sent a C&D letter:
http://ign64.ign.com/articles/074/074185p1.html
Back then it wasn't easy to find talented people, but it wasn't so hard to fine-tune your skills by programming. If Blizzard/Vivendi wants to burn all the steps by pissing off programmers, let them be.
My point is: we can't do a lot alone for resolving the shitty situation of freecraft, yet we can do something for every oss developer: band together and make the oss scene prosper, even if we have to move underground.
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
Attention moderators, this guy is just plain wrong. Worse still, he's pure FUD. Must work for Blizzard.
The purpose of the FreeCraft project is to create an open source WC2 implementation that can be played on any platform. If you own a legal copy of WC2, you can use the datafiles from the CD for artwork, music, and so forth. If you do not, there's a rather low-quality substitute that is entirely free for anyone to use. This project is great because you might own WC2, but you may not be running Windows (anymore). Wouldn't it suck that your money would have to go down the toilet just because you chose to run a differerent (superior) OS? That's bullshit. FreeCraft is interoperability software and it's perfectly legit. I could see an argument on the name, but there's no reason they can't build a clone of the engine.
If anything, just stop and think about the basics of the situation. You have a group of volunteers creating a program for free who are being shut down by a greedy mega-corporation. Do you really think the FreeCraft project is so evil and Blizzard is justified?
Join Tor today!
Witch Covens around the world are in a state of confusion after receiving threating "Cease and Desist" letters from Blizzard's lawyers for their product known as "WitchCraft"(c) which may be confused with "StarCraft"(c) or "WarCraft"(c).
When a coven leader was asked how they planned to respond to the threat, she replied "We are split between a rare disease and swarms of insects, though a natural disaster at Blizzard headquarters is not out of the question. Oh, the lawyers won't be a problem, they work for for the same guy (putting hands to each side of her head to make a symbol of horns ) we do."
In other news, Blizzard's CEO mysteriously hired a n exorcist to make a house call. More details at 11.
I can't afford a sig!
You aren't charged a single cent to use this free massive multiplayer network
Exactly.
A friend of mine works for Blizzard, and once got to see the rows of cabinets for B.Net-West. Between servers, network gear, and bandwidth, they have millions of dollars tied up in the system -- and it's all free of charge to those who have purchased their games. In addition, they still pay a fair amount of attention to older games, periodically releasing patches with some of them containing gameplay enhancements, as with the coming 1.10 patch for Diablo II.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If this is a correct screenshot here, it looks like a hell-of-a-boatload of copyright infringement, as the artwork looks to be directly taken from Warcraft 2, which is a BIG no-no.
This is a large company protecting its copyrights, not just trademarks.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I see all these comments with peoples' panties in a knot. "BLIZZARD IS ANTI OSS!" "DONT BUY BLIZZARD GAMES! BOYCOTT!"
/. way, but lets get some things straight:
:P
Well thats all fine and dandy, and is the
Freecraft's goal was to recreate Warcraft 2 exactly. I know this firsthand as well, because I have played freecraft extensively. The UI is similar to Warcraft2, ALL the gameplay is EXACTLY the same. That means peons, gold mines, lumber, oil, etc. All the buildings are the same, perform the same duties, units cost the same, etc. All this is identical to Warcraft 2. You even have the option of sticking in your war2 cd and it will rip the art from the CD and use it with freecraft!
Blizzard is only protecting their IP which they rightfully own. Freecraft's goal was to make a free version of War2 that plays exactly the same. Like it or not, they are still ripping off war2 completely. And War2 is still a product that Blizzard sells and supports on battle.net so they have a vested interest in protecting the IP of this game (so you cant use the "rom" argument where its an old game that isnt sold anymore)
If you still don't believe me, try a warcraft 2 cheat code in freecraft and see what happens
Its clear that the intent of freecraft was to totally rip off Blizzard's IP. Don't go crying and start a jihad against blizzard without at least getting all the info.
"theres plenty of open source game engines to use"
There are? I can think of CrystalSpace, and Quake II as the only decent open-source FPS engines (and none of them is that good, compared to the likes of DoomIII, HL2, Halo2, etc), and Freecraft was the only decent RTS engine. Is there some secret 31337 open-source engine repository I'm missing out on?
Yes, there is Neoengine. It's decent, check it out.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You can still get the full source for a fairly recent version here (remove the space between freec and raft):n /f/freec raft/freecraft_1.18.orig.tar.gz
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/mai
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
Storyline is for single-player masturbation games like RPG's. But anyways - I'm working on a game engine, and even with DirectX taking most of the graphics load off of us (yeah, we're win32 bitches) its still a fuckload of work.
He's not saying that the engine is the hard part, or the most important part (the amount of quality games for the Half-Life engine shows that a shitty engine can produce quality games) its just that its a buttload of work that is being reinvented over and over.
That being said - like the OS world is great at code reuse and building projects. I find that OSS coders are just as bad about reinventing the wheel as professional devs. Unless the project is famous and easy to embed (STL, Python, etc) then they'll work from scratch.
WC3 was a piece of bloated buggy crap
What exactly makes WC3 bloated? Even with the expansion beta installed the whole thing only takes up ~750mb. Which is about the average a game takes up. And I have never, not even once, had WC3 crash on me, not even during 3 months of beta testing the expansion. I have installed the game on numerous machines and never had a problem. The game works under wine for fucks sake, and has since wine version 2.
And as far as accounts go, they get deleted after 90 days of inactivity.
I guess I just have to conclude from your comments that you're a congenital idiot, and therefore too stupid to install and use the game correctly.
Not to mention, it might've been smart to at least *try* to make the game a little different than WarCraft.
Personally, I fail to see how enforcing IP rights on this is such a barbaric thing. People are up-in-arms because it's an open-source project, but I doubt any of you would be too happy if you were running a small dev studio and saw people copying your work and passing it off as their own. It doesn't matter if the game is old or not, it's still *your* creation.
Although, I sniped out what you were refering to, I think you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself, why does Blizzard need to "hurt" FreeCraft. And why did they wait so long!? FreeCraft didn't harm anyone. Blizzard did.
Simple. FreeCraft offers/offered a version of WarCraft II that plays, sounds, looks, and feels exactly like Blizzard's version. Like it or not, they should have asked for and gotten explicit permission before porting it in the manner they did.
Sorry, but just because you hate the fact that something isn't free or under a less restrictive license....That doesn't give you free reign to do whatever you want with it and escape consequences.
But ask yourself, how much longer until they reach the point of diminishing return, by pissing off the very folks that buy their products. WC3 was a piece of bloated buggy crap. (wouldn't even install correctly on two different boxes)
Mmhmm...And was this under a real installation of Windows, or using VMware/WINE/another Windows replacement? Was it possibly a hardware/software problem on your part, and no fault of Blizzard's? Did you actually try and contact Blizzard for support?
And that was $50.00 a pop at COSTCO! The support was crap, and then battle.net won't let you logon (even with the right password.)
Again, were you trying to log on to Battle.net using WINE or something similar? Myself and hundreds of thousands of other people have been able to use Battle.net perfectly fine, more times than I can count, so I question whether you're just pulling an isolated incident out of your ass and trying to make it into a bigger issue.
They have too god damn much personal information about those using Bnet.
The only personal information they have is what you give them. You don't want them supposedly spying on you, put fake info in the profile, or don't put anything there at all.
They Killed the Open Source Version of BNet Servers. That pissed more people off.
I tried some free servers for both Starcraft and Warcraft, and frankly, I thought they were crap compared to the real, free Battle.net. Not as many players, just as much rudeness, and a severe lack of gmes being hosted.
Use chess as an inspiration
And "saving" a game and playing it back is cool too
microsoft word = warcraft II
Word processor = RTS
Anyone disagree?
It's illegal to make microsoft word if you are not microsoft, you can still make word processors. Now, word processors are usually very similar, so yeah, it might look like every word processor is an imitation of the others. But games have a lot more variation than word processors do. It seems as though freecraft has identical game dynamics to warcraft II, the only difference being the graphics.
Some versions of simcity have exchangable tilesets, is it legal to distribute copies of it without the tilesets? no. Maxis owns the whole game. Not just the pretty little pictures.
While I think this is a bit of a shame, you have actually answered your own question. For a twenty-player LAN game, you need exactly one WC2 CD to get the media from, which is 19 less than Blizzard implied in the license. Further, it clearly states on the box what the minimum system requirements are to use the CD, and they include Windows. If the Wine project was just about duping Windows kernel functionality and expecting the end user to copy all the cabs off of a Windows CD for decent fucntionality, I'm sure Microsoft would be unimpressed as well.
- Chris
I've been somewhat involved in the project for a month or so now so I have slightly more insight than the average person. As far as i can tell their is no fucking letter. This letter was sent to an Xdeveloper who has not shown it to anyone. This same Xdeveloper owns the freecraft domains and as soon as he wasn't involved with the project any longer he put them up for sale... hmmm
Its all bullshit, there probably is no fucking letter. Any other project would have debated this and they would have posted the letter as well, i personally watched them just quit without discussion and fucking everyone else who was working on the project.
Is it just me, but why don't they just change the name of the game?
After all, the "ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2" argument doesn't stand on its own; almost every RTS released since WarCraft 2 contain similar design ideas...
you don't need a dedicated Game Engine to write a game - choose all the bits that make up a gameengine from free libraries that are out there.
Eg. I use SDL for the windowing wrapper, OpenSceneGraph for the scene graph engine, PUI for the GUI... there are loads of such libraries.
The reason I do this - none of the game engines have all the pieces I want, or have them fully implemented. By mixing and matching libraries I can take the best, or more appropriate ones for me.
I know every time I see one of these these lumbering down the road I get confused and think maybe its a roving Blizzard expo, or promotional thing for the next installment of the tired ol' RTS genre.
I wish Blizzard et al would go after Starcraft RV too to protect me and all the other mindless drone comsumers from the risk of confusing two obviously different products with each other... what about Mastercraft boats, Chris*Craft boats, etc? Blizzard sure has a lot of work to do, I'm glad they are looking out for us easily confused consumers.
On a serious note, I think I'll stop buying Blizzard products all together. My entertainment dollars will go to a company with less intellectual property fascists on staff.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Have you actually ever played warceaft II before?
"While I think this is a bit of a shame, you have actually answered your own question. For a twenty-player LAN game, you need exactly one WC2 CD to get the media from, which is 19 less than Blizzard implied in the license."
You could play a game with 1 cd before, not with 19 people at once, but that is only because the game didn't support that many. They even made it so you could install "friend" version os the game. Same with starcraft. However, Blizzard is no longer a consumer oriented company.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Look, they didn't just call themselves freecraft, they explicitly tried to copy warcraft while making a generic engine. This was an undisguised goal, they SAID this was their objective and have for years. When are people going to learn you just can't legally copy someone else's game wholesale like this, it doesn't matter how much of a fan you are.
As for only corporate interests being able to fight Blizzard off, corporate interests would NEVER have done this. Sure they may have similar games and concepts, but they have very different names, and they have very different content and even a few original ideas of their own.
Make your own engine, make your own name come up with your own scenarios/world/content. They didn't do at least two of these.
There's no need to kill freecraft. Simply ditch the current content and change the name, then come up with your own units etc, and no this doesn't just mean Blizzard's units with your bitmap. All this falling on your own sword is overly dramatic, it ain't Blizzards fault that you decided to copy their game.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To all who agree with Blizzard: I think you are right a little, but still why not try to replicate what you see if you don't steal any code/graphics? Your replica might be worse or better. What if the first automobile company tried to shut down any other initiave to make automobiles?
What about OpenOffice vs. MS Office? Their names are similar, they look a lot the same, Open Office can read/write MS Office files. Should Open Office be required to change names, UI and support for MS Office files?
In a short press statement, Blizzard also announced that they had sent a cease and desist order to all American airlines, requesting that they no longer refer to their vehicles as "Aircraft", but recommended that they use the term "fossil fuel powered heavier than air flying machine" instead.
Agreed. Once again, I am reminded of my favorite Heinlein quote:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Given that Blizzard is using the trademarks "StarCraft" and "WarCraft" in this very specific market (realtime computer strategy games), their claim that "FreeCraft" infringes on their copyright is reasonable and very likely winnable in court.
So, no problem, just rename FreeCraft to a unique name that clearly isn't derivative of Blizzard's product. And don't be mad that they asked you to do this, because they have the right and obligation to protect their copyrights.
On the other hand, unless you've physically ripped code or content out of StarCraft or WarCraft and put it in your game, any claim that your game is "too similar" to theirs seems absurd and almost certainly has no basis in copyright or trademark law. If you ignore them on that issue, then they are almost certain to go away.
And if they don't go away nicely, the resulting outrage over their persecution of the open source community would almost certainly force them to go away ashamedly.
But if you just cave in, and you fail to stand up for your rights when presented with this sort of threat, then you are certain to lose your rights.
If a person asks you to get out of his seat, you move. If a bully asks you to give up YOUR seat, you fight.
I wish open source developers had a bit more business sense. They make some software that works in conjunction with commercial software, but get themselves caught in a situation where they're at risk of getting sued by the makers of the commercial software. I bet it never occurred to any of them to simply approach Blizzard with their code, offer to sell it to Blizzard, and have it put on the official CDROM so Blizzard can say it supports Linux/Solaris/etc. Hell, it's GPLed, so Blizzard wouldn't even have to pay, they could just do that themselves.
But no, they're incompetent, and now they're just throwing their whole project away.
Oy, and to think: I almost mis-spelled hypocrisy too. :)
His post was not the definition of hypocrisy: it merely evinced it. He implied that he found fault with their actions, but then promised to buy their products anyway. I find the latter inconsistent with the former. Is that so controversial?
I think I see my error now. Looking back, all he really said was that he puts a higher priority on fun then on âoepoliticsâ. That didn't make any sense to me. I should have known from his characterization of this misdeed as politics, that he didn't really mind Blizzard's actions.
I stand corrected.
Can u guys stop using the name of the great Wing Commander 3 for such a lame game as Warcraft3? Use War3 instead of WC3... Yes.. Mod me troll... :p
How is it moral to copy someone's work instead of doing your own?
You can't rip off other peoples games. Tough luck, Blizzard is not in the wrong here.