[crossfire] Crossfire+/Crossfire2 Versioning and Metaserver

[Anton Oussik]

On 14/04/07, mwedel at sonic.net <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
> 4) Any servers should be free and open, that is to say, not pay for use/play.

I am not sure 4) is fair. If people have hardware and time they can
donate to run a server that is one thing, but if a CF derivative ever
becomes very popular and needs a farm to run on, it is likely a fee
would have to be introduced to cover hardware costs, and possibly even
hire full time admins/dms/mapmakers/artists. As long as the source
code is released under GPL and anyone is free to set up their own
server I would still consider that server "free and open", I see no
problems there. The subscribers would be paying for services that
accompany the game, not the game itself. When/if pay for play servers
are introduced they could send pay for play information to the
metaserver, thus avoiding confusion.

Then again someone could also make a new tileset and their own maps,
and say "do not redistribute" whilst running them on their own server,
for which they could charge money. I am not sure there is anything GPL
can do about that.

There is also a potential issue of someone creating a compatible
server/client from scratch not using any GPL code, and charging for
using it. Ultimately there is very little that can be done about that
as far as I can see, as any proprietary server/client could be made to
pretend to be one of the free ones.