Re: [linuxiran] FreeCraft gone, what's next?

[Aryan Ameri]

On Monday 23 June 2003 22:19, Hooman Baradaran wrote:

> FreeCraft was a WarCr*ft clone which came with a game pack but also
> used the WarCraft CD if you wanted to. It was GPL. It wasn't illegal.
> It was just a clone like PrBroom (the Doom clone) or QuakeForge. In
> fact there are many clones that come without game packs and you need
> the game CD like those that I mentioned (I don't particularly care
> about those because if I am to get the game CD I'll just use the
> original. And besides I only open source play games because I like
> the fact that they are open source.)
>
> I had a typing error it my email, the game came with some open source
> maps, I wrote that "I" had some maps.
>
> Anyway, Blizzard, the company who owns the original game has asked
> them to shutdown because the name was similar. Blizzard could not sue
> them so easily but they freaked out and shut down the project.

In the US judical system, it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. 
That system awards the side with more money, and the fact is, in this 
case this was Blizzard. 

A public defendant, who only meets you 3 minutes before the court, then 
reviews the documents for 2 minutes, and talks with you for 1 minute 
before going into the court room, can't help you much. You need good 
lawyers to win, and good lawyers take good money. For someone like me 
and you, who are working on a free software project just as a hobby, we 
can't afford to be sued. 

An other example, a couple of weeks ago, RIAA sued a student, for 
copyright infringment. This guy, had invented and searching algorithm, 
and had made a very decent search engine. Don't get me worng, he didn't 
give any kind of music to anyone, he only had made a search engine.

Well, RIAA sued him, and he decided to give up his life saving, and 
settled with RIAA out of court. He gave RIAA $15,000 (US dollars, not 
canadian) to shut their mounth up. 

If RIAA had gone to court, they didn't have a single chance of winning. 
I mean, how can you sue someone for operating a search engine? But 
anyway, this guy IMO did a sensible thing, because in the law suite, 
RIAA wanted damages of $98 Billion. Yes, they claimed they had lost $98 
Billion dollars because of the operation of this search engine. 

You see, it is not easy for a student to go to court, and defend a multi 
billion dollar case. He decided it would be better to give up what ever 
he had in bank, and simply get on with his life, instead of risking his 
entire life, ruined by RIAA.

> The question is what if something like the SCO case happens to a
> smaller project that we care about - let's say for having a code
> copied, just like SCO - and they freak out and close the project.

If the problem was only the name, as Zoup mentions, they should have 
only changed it and continue working. In the KDE 2.x days, one of 
KOffice applications was called KIllustrator. Adobe, sued KDE, claiming 
that the word Illustrator is it's registered tradmark. The KDE guys had 
to change the name to Kivio.

Problem with names, comes up very frequently. Even now that I am wrting 
this, Palm Inc has contacted the Open BeOS free software group, and 
they are going to accept Palm's claim, and change their name. Palm 
bought Be Inc, the maker of BeOS Operating system, in 2001. Some of 
BeOS lovers, who didn't want to see their operating system die, decided 
to make a Open Source project, and re-create BeOS. The called the 
project, OpenBeOS. Now they have to change their name, cause BeOS is 
now a tradmark of Palm, Inc.

These things happen everyday in the world. That's why, when starting a 
project, you should choose your name wisely. Hell, even Mozilla had to 
change two of their browser's name recently. Phoenix became Firebird, 
and Chimera became Camino, just because of this simple name thing.

But why did this FreeCraft guys, completely shut down the project? It 
should have had something other than the name thing. I guess blizard 
treatend them of something, and they decided to just gave up the 
project. It happens.

Well, why such a thing won't happen to a big project. Because if there 
were enough people interested in the project, they would have made up a 
mechanism for accepting donations, and then could have gone to court. 

And there is always the EFF. Electronic Frountier Foundation, is the 
foundation which stands up to defend your rights, in these matters. If 
you dream of one day, in which these stupid legal problems don't happen 
again, if you are concerned with the validity of Open Source projects, 
then the best thing to do is donate some money, to EFF. IMHO it is the 
responsibility of every Open source user. I myself, a student with no 
fixed income, donate as much as I can. We should all care about our 
freedom.

> And yes, the source is out there and the project can come back online
> with another name and some changes but why should there even be a
> such a thing?

Because the world is not "ideal city"

> We probably know by what happens to SCO. Of course they are unlikely
> to win. I mean who knows if "they" haven't copied "their" code from
> Linux? Or if some Linux hacker has copied their code it's his falt
> not Linux but until we know what will happen to the SCO case anything
> that happens against open source makes me go nuts. X-(

Don't think about this SCO too much. IBM has got more than 20,000 
registered patents. If they want, they can find at least a dozon of 
them which SCO is not paying royalties for. IBM has got a legal 
department compareable only to that of DoJ.

They went the wrong path. Suing IBM is not the best thing, a dying 
company can do.

Cheers

-- 
/* "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a 
conservative without changing a single idea." 
                        --Robert Anton Wilson*/
Aryan Ameri