[crossfire] Crossfire+/Crossfire2 Versioning and Metaserver

[Andrew Fuchs]

On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 11:10 +0100, Anton Oussik wrote:
> 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.

They could possibly have something like runescape (ew) where it can be
played for free, but offers subscriptions that enable you to do more.
Though I still see issues with this model.

> 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.

I think someone did something like this already, not sure about the
name.