Slashdot Mirror
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!"
The license agreement:
This Microsoft Research Shared Source license agreement ("MSR-SSLA") is a legal
agreement between you and Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft" or "we") for the software
or data identified above, which may include source code, and any associated materials,
text or speech files, associated media and "online" or electronic documentation (together,
the "Software").
By installing, copying, or otherwise using this Software, found at
http://research.microsoft.com/downloads, you agree to be bound by the terms of this
MSR-SSLA. If you do not agree, do not install copy or use the Software. The Software is
protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and is licensed, not sold.
SCOPE OF RIGHTS:
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in
this License. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic
research, public demonstrations and personal experimentation. You may also distribute
this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on
websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software for academic or other non-
commercial purposes.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for
commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business
operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, distributing the Software for use
with commercial products or any other activity which purpose is to procure a commercial
gain to you or others.
If the Software includes source code or data, you may modify such portions of the
Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, as provided
herein.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the
Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's
copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. That you will not remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That 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.
3. That if you distribute the Software or any derivative works of the Software, you
will distribute them under a verbatim copy of this License, and you will not grant
rights to the Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by
this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of the Software
under terms that would permit commercial use, or under terms that purport to
require the Software or such derivative works to be sublicensed to others.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative works, and distribute
such modifications or derivative works, you will cause the modified files to carry
prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving the original
Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you have changed the Software; and
(ii) the date of any changes.
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the rights to reproduce, install, use, modify, distribute and transfer your
modifications to the Software source code or data.
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and Microsoft shall be free to use the feedback as it sees fit without obligation or
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7. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS
MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING
WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ANY WARRANTY AGAINST
INTERFERENCE WITH YOUR ENJOYMENT OF THE SOFTWARE OR ANY
WA
I have been pwned because my
The Allegiance Demo is available here.
The ______ Agenda
First off, why is this article not on the front page?
Second, I don't see anything denying the ability to create a Linux port. Is this right? I must admit I'm very surprised to hear this. I've never heard of this game, but I'm intrigued by the fact that Microsoft is releasing source code to the public!
Is this some sort of trick? I find it ironic that microsoft is giving allegiance to open source. Sure, it's not free (as in liberated), but it's a step in the right direction.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Nintendo today, released to the open source community the source code for the virtual boy smash hit "Panic Bomber".
From Nintendo VP of Open Source, "We feel that we're doing the world a service by releasing such a popular game to the masses for their free consumption and alteration."
Linus Torvalds says, "The open source community has a new friend in Nintendo. Of course, releasing a free dev kit for the gamecube would be nice, but this... this is even better. We can now program for the virtual boy."
Slashdot user TechBoy880 had this to say, "My life is now complete... I can now mod my favorite game of all time. Now we just need to press Nintendo to release the hardware specs and a dev kit to go along with this..."
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
I appluad MS for doing this. (-1 Troll i know)
I would like to see it happen much more often.
They can't be making money off this game anymore, so why not give back to the community.
Let those who love the game make it better, or atlest better to them.
Relic recently released the source to HomeWorld 1, and i know many people (including myself to a small extent) have been pouring through it to implement the features that we thought should be in the game. Right click movement, better combat, simpler camera control, better UI, ect.
The multiplayer nature of Allegaince may make it less friendly to such changes, but i do look forward to seeing the creativity of the community at work. (and who knows, an allegiance single player campaign may come from this)
I must say I'm impressed! I've been playing this game with said community for months now, and on the alleg.net forums, people have actually discussed trying to buy the source code from MS. Now that it's out there, I really can't wait to see what kind of mods the community will come out with.
My respect for MS just jumped up a notch... Still negative, but closer to zero.
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
No, this license is decidedly unlike the GPL. This license is somewhat akin to the Mozilla Public License (which was dropped due to people complaining). Basically, Microsoft and Microsoft alone gets rights roughly equivalent (though slightly more in their favor) than the BSD license. They get royalty-free rights to do anything they want to with your code.
On the other hand, the rights granted to *non*-Microsoft entities are much more restrictive -- non-commercial only.
Effectively, this makes you a free coder for Microsoft -- the only company that can ever financially benefit from the code you produce is Microsoft.
This is *not* a turnaround for Microsoft (other than the fact that they are opening some of their own code, which is a change). From a commercial standpoint, they are giving up zero IP (they do not allow you to use copyrighted or patented information, which may be present in their release. This is very different from the GPL, where copyrighted data must be available for commercial use, and you *cannot* have patents on methods used in the software. Microsoft has previously promoted BSD-like licenses that would allow them profit. This license is notable in that it is GPL-incompatible.
From a strategic point of view, there is little Microsoft stands to risk here. The program is, as others have pointed out, written in DirectX, and would be difficult to port to anything other than Windows (well, perhaps other than the X-Box). It might assist a small amount in improving WINE, but that's about it.
I'm not sure whether this includes a data file release -- this is the only thing that weirds me out, as doing so would be extremely unusual. I would expect not, but ~600 MB seems excessive for source code alone. Perhaps if someone could check this out?
That being said, I'm certainly not going to complain -- I see very few ways in which we are worse off after this release. This is a clear win for former fans and players of the game. Microsoft *has* done a few notable things that I would not have expected of them. They have not placed legal restrictions on porting, though there may be a practical limitation. I suppose one could argue that Microsoft is hoping to start a trend of companies doing open-source releases chosing not to use the GPL, but that seems a bit conspiracy theory-oriented even for Slashdot.
The only concern I can think of is Microsoft's worries about PR with this move. It may not be much of an issue -- recently, there has been a good amount of business hyping of "open source". Microsoft hasn't been bashing "open source" much in the past year or so -- just the GPL. It's a reasonable supposition that this has been intentional from a strategic standpoint.
Another weird thing is that Microsoft Research is the organization doing the release. That's very, very odd. I strongly suspect that Microsoft Research is *not* where the entertainment division is located (Bungie isn't a subdivision of Microsoft Reesearch), so unless they are responsible for old software, I can't see why they're involved. Could be that they're a bit more academia-oriented, and that there's some scientist pushing for open-sourcing something that doesn't have significant IP value to Microsoft any more.
If Microsoft wants to test the waters for non-GPL open source possibilities, this is a very good, safe way for them to do so. This game still has active users. Game technology moves so quickly that a four-year-old-game has little that folks might steal from them -- and in any case, Microsoft is not releasing any of their previous IP.
I *really* wish Microsoft would open-source the Close Combat series (they probably don't own copyright on it, but it's a nice thought). Microsoft or no, I'd be willing to buy copies of all of the series if I could get an open source Linux-compatible copy -- that series is phenomenal.
May we never see th
Note the "source" download also includes all raw media files, including all sound files, image files (bitmaps...), and the WAV file format CD music tracks.
95% of the source zip is media...
My