The petition: a pragmatic view?

[Trifna]

I remember that I was surprised how old games such as Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and others were on emulator but could not be legally played OR BOUGHT on emulator. You needed to buy the console and the cassette... plastic.

To me, it seemed like Nintendo could do a win-win deal by letting go its material on emulators, whattever way they might have chosen. Joined with marketting, it seemed to be a potentially important public relation (and perhaps money) slam dunk.

Then Nintendo reused all this on GameBoy: success. But Civ has Civ 1-2-3 and 4 coming. Does it make Civ2 not-to-be-used again? Anyone knows that? Because I think this is really what they might be looking at as the main point, legally or else.

For gaming companies, it's the modern Machiavel making some rules out there and they need to consider it. I'm not concluding, but I ask the question

[curtsibling]

If they even just let some of the code out or explained how
to remove the limits on certain game aspects that would be
a great move forward.

[Broken_Erika]

They might release the code and mabe hire the programmers of the best variant based on the source code,

[Trifna]

For a partial release, what I heard of was not about petitioning especially for partial release (though I might be partially wrong). So it is still pertinent.


It does not answer the question: What are their limits? Asking Firaxis to do something which would hit them is not like asking something with zero cost. If I know more, I can decide more wisely (and same for others). If they kept it until now, there might be some reasons (yet it seems source codes are generally kept infinitely... which seems like a useless loss).

I understand that petitions are also partially a stance like "We confirm our serious interest in this, and we would like...", but the question remains: What is limiting them?

[CapTVK]

Trifna,

What motivates a company to release a piece of software for free ? There could be a couple of reasons but before I do that I should explain a few terms.


First a company can release under a specific license. What license to choose? You can release a game as freeware, which means the game is free for use (play), but still copyrighted! Freeware usually refers to the binary, not the underlying sourcecode plus additonal material like graphics and SFX.

Releases with things like sourcecode usually come with more specific licenses like the GPL, BSD, a specially written one (like the CtP2 one) or even the (very rare) Public Domain. There's a certain amount of freedom depending on the license its released under.
Releasing source is something more then a "partial release". There's nothing partial about it. You're releasing the innards of the game for all to see, good or bad.
Note: I'm only talking about the source here. Not GFX and SFX.

At this point other licensees and involved parties come in. Some companies license material from other parties to use in their game. At that point it gets tricky...

Let's say I have license from Disney to use a character like Donald Duck in a game. I make a nice platform game with Donald in it. It becomes a quick hit in the early 90's and drops into obscurity promptly after that. 10 years later there's a group of fans that would like to see this game released again. Let's assume that by luck i'm still in business, retain the copyright on all my titles and am favourable to releasing this game as freeware. Maybe even with the source, if i can find it....Let's say I scrounge up this old backup with the original and even the source but after a quick call from legal advisor I learn that the license from Disney was only valid for 5 years. I can't even commercially re-release this game with the Disney characters in it!

At that point I can go to the trouble of screening and removing all the offending graphics material from the game (more work). I could also only release the source (although that might need a cleanup as well before its release ready).

Should I even bother? It really depends, likely there's no monetary gain for me in this game anymore (Civ2 seems to pop up in stores from time to time though). So that argument is out of the way. I could do it as a gesture of goodwill towards the community, a nice PR stunt for my next platformer, altruism or a casual "Why not?". But there's also reasons not to like a really bad coding style I'm now ashamed off or other parties like sketched above may be involved.

The real "limit" and question is: " can i and do I have the authority to make that decision"? In this example I can, because I still own the title (although I may be limited due to other parties involved).

Firaxis might be another matter. The Civ games have passed through a number of hands through the years. At this point it isn't totally clear with whom the ownership of the Civ2 titles rests (Take2? Firaxis? Atari/Infogrames?). Firing off a letter to Firaxis won't do it alone. You need to find the person(s) who can and make that decision.
It can be tricky and may take a long time but that shouldn't stop us from trying. Various companies have released the sourcecode for games in the past. So there's hope!