Microsoft Releases Allegiance Game Source

Zenin writes "Microsoft has graciously released the source code to Allegiance for free on their site. Allegiance was released back in 2000, and rated the 'Best Game No One Played' by GameSpot - this little- known multiplayer space-combat/team-RTS was pretty innovative, yet never took off in the mainstream. Nevertheless it quickly developed a fanatical following - a dedicated community who reverse engineered the game to enable complete mods, expand server power, and much more. A million thanks to Joel 'solap' Dehlin and the rest of the Allegiance development team for making this happen!"

Comments

Re:For your perusal

[sardiax]

the license could be better, particularly the part about them being granted back the rights to any modifications, but its nice to see microsoft releasing the source for anything at this point. :)

Re:For your perusal

[Anonymous Coward]

Not one but two instances of content-free karma whoring! Amazing.

If you're not in a hurry to just download the archive (warning: this is fucking huge, specifically 511MB), let's take a closer look at some of the pertinent points of that licence:

• "You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this License." In other words, no commercial use, which means no inclusion in Linux distributions and such. The only way they want anyone to be able to fetch Allegiance's source code is through their clickwrap licence.
• "If any of the Software is in binary format, you will not attempt to modify such portions of the Software, or to reverse engineer or decompile them, except and only to the extent authorized by law." Too bad if you want to examine the binary data (graphics, audio, maps...) in order to, say, figure out the formats and make your own.
• "Microsoft is granted back, without any limitations and on a royalty free basis, the rights to reproduce, install, use, modify, distribute and transfer your modifications to the Software source code or data." In other words, all your changes are belong to them, and they're thoughtfully granting themselves distribution of your code without the licensing restrictions which you get hammered with!
• "If you breach this MSR-SSLA or if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically and you shall destroy all of your copies of the Software immediately. Section 5 of this MSR-SSLA [the self-granting of unlimited distribution rights, just quoted] shall survive any termination of this license." In other words, if they decide in their infinite wisdom that you're breaking their licence, you have to send all your work into the crapper.

My opinion (for all the piddling amount that an anonymous coward's opinion counts for)? Fuck this and find a Sourceforge or Freshmeat project to chip in on.

Re:For your perusal

[Zenin]

*yawn*, whatever

For any commercial software company to do this much is amazing, doubly so for a game company, and a hundred fold over for MS to do it. So this doesn't help you make a million bucks with "your" brand new video game or further the agenda of the misnamed FSF. So what? This release does exactly what it was intended to do and it does it extremely well: It allows those of us who love the game and have been working hard to improve it for years a huge new arsenal with which to go about said improvements.

If you want to make a brand new space sim free to the public, go right ahead; it lets you do that too.

But really, boo-*&^$!ing-hoo that perhaps you can't throw yet another app into a KitchenSink(tm) Linux install. Who cares? FreeBSD solved such simple issues very cleanly nearly a decade ago now with the ports system, why can't Linux?