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StarCraft Is Now Free, Nearly 20 Years After Its Release (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game -- plus the Brood War expansion -- for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would've cost $10-15 bucks. The company says they've also used this opportunity to improve the game's anti-cheat system, add "improved compatibility" with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and fix a few long lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison -- so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right?
Seems like yesterday the wife was bitching and moaning about how much time I spent playing that game. I'm getting old, fast.
The GPL's negative effect on freedom
Nope. The government stepping in and putting you in jail for lynching undesireables is a "negative effect on freedom" but is still a net gain in freedom. "Forcing" freedom is still more freedom than anarchy. In practice, anarchy quickly becomes a warlord system. So GPL, forcing those who use it to remain open isn't a negative effect on freedom.
Unless you think that putting a mass murderer in prison is a negative effect on freedom.
Learn to love Alaska
The fact that the GPL "requires" people to do so many things means that it's taking away freedom.
Whose freedom? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee 100% freedom to each of them simultaneously. They are incompatible. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So, it makes no sense simply to state that a license "reduces freedom in general". So, let's please stop saying imprecisely wrong things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because it puts restrictions on the way I can redistribute it". The GPL has always been about protecting the freedoms of the end-users at all cost, not the the vendors' freedoms.
Yet it is the most popular open-source license by far, and has given us the infrastructure for the entire internet, powered some of the biggest supercomputers ever built which are helping to solve the mysteries of the universe and so on and so forth.
The BSD systems, even after release, and despite being arguably better in some technical measures never achieved such an impact on the world, their biggest achievement was having MacOSX based on FreeBSD. Sure the GPL precluded what apple did there - and that was why apple chose FreeBSD - but the BSD Licenses failed to build an open internet for the masses or an OS that runs most of it's servers (and a growing number of desktops and virtually all of it's mobile devices).
The GPL succeeded where the BSD licenses failed exactly because it understood that to make society, overall, more free you must REDUCE the freedom of the few in favour of the freedom of the many. Because when you do not, the few will use their freedom to remove freedom from the many - they will BECOME tyrants.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *