It started when the company behind The Saga of Ryzom, and service provider for the online game, called Nevrax, announced [2] on Monday 20th November on ryzom.com official web page that they are entering a liquidation process, entering negotiations with interested companies whom might take over the current project.
Facing this situation, players, some old nevrax team members and other opensource sympathisers have positioned in favor of a free software alternative for the game. The people at ryzom.org are trying to raise pledges for donations so they can try to face the costs to buy the intelectual property rights for the game, allowing them to publish it under GPL licenses as well as trying to set a non-profit paid game service with the robustness it requires.
The goals of the group are reflected on a Social Contract [3] they?ve got published on their page, which compromises them to release the source code and all other material under GPL or GPL-like licenses, like it?s the case of other well known software packages, so it would become one of the new generation MMORPG games entirely mantained by the open source community.
This group has a very short time to try to raise funds (through community pledges) to become a solid option to be taken into account on the next few days, when the liquidator will have to decide whom to sell the game and it?s ownership.
This initiative, on another hand, isn?t a pioneer, since there has been previous actions like this one, namely the Blender project, which succeeded in a similar situation, allowing Blender to become one of the most powerful tools in the scene.
References
[1] Free Ryzom Project - http://www.ryzom.org
[2] Nevrax news regarding liquidation - http://www.ryzom.com/news/archive/2006/11/20/important-information
[3] Free Ryzom Project Social Contract - http://www.ryzom.org/page/project_socialcontract
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