FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard 808
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
Re:name change? (Score:2, Informative)
Private mirror here (.au) (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't the first time... (Score:2, Informative)
Even if in the case of Freecraft, it doesn't seem as they were chalenging Blizzard's market or something...
Re:just a little update! (Score:4, Informative)
C'mon, people, you can find a lawyer very [lawyers.com] easily [findlaw.com]. Most offer a low price for the initial consultation. It is in your best interest to talk to one before you take any action, so that you understand the consequence and any repercussions that will arise from your decision. Even capitulation may have dire consequences [kansascity.com].
I talked to laywer regarding an IP issue a while back and it only cost me $20 for a 1/2 hour (it would've cost $200 for the next hour---it would have been worth it---but I didn't need that long).
its all still in CVS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:If you dont plan to buy any other Blizzard game (Score:5, Informative)
Why, exactly, does the purpose of supporting a game/company need to be to hurt and kill another?
Even if you hate them personally, or they (or their parent company, more likely) do nasty things sometimes, admit it- Blizzard makes kickass games that LOTS of people love. Starcraft is 5 years old, and yet there's still around 10,000 people playing it on Battle.net at any given time.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Starcraft Battle Chest: $20
Diablo II: $20 each for the main game and expansion.
Warcraft II: $11.99
Battle.net: Completely free.
Yep, they're sure being greedy alright.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
So you're saying that games without monthly fees are outdated? Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough monthly fees to pay already.
Re:If you dont plan to buy any other Blizzard game (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.radonlabs.de/
I don't know why this marvelous engine hasn't caught the attention of the slashcrew yet. But it's all I ever wanted in an engine. Professional games that even have hit the shelves have already been made.
Check it out. radon labs deserves "our" support
Re:If you dont plan to buy any other Blizzard game (Score:2, Informative)
Theres ALOT more than just those two. (Score:5, Informative)
Theres dozens, theres a few that are pretty good, no they arent as good as Doom3(until ID releases the source) or Turbines engine, but they dont have to be, they just have to be good enough to make PS2 quality games.
Most of these games would look better than anything on the PS2. There is an open source game repository but are you willing to donate money to make these games good? Or will you complain about quality when you dont pay?
Well here are some engines.
Genesis3d [genesis3d.com]
Nooface [nooface.net]
WorldForge [worldforge.org]
Reality FactoryM [t-online.de]
Ogre [sourceforge.net]
Obsidian [zog.net.au]
More at LinuxGames [linuxgames.com]
Re:Freecraft is a ripoff. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Freecraft is a ripoff. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Freecraft is a ripoff. (Score:1, Informative)
To quote the FreeCraft description:
"FreeCraft is a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine. It is possible to play against human opponents over LAN, internet, or against the computer. The engine can be used to build RTS games like C&C, WarCraft, StarCraft or AOE. It successfully runs under Linux, BSD, BeOS, MacOS/X,MacOS/Darwin and MS Windows. Since FreeCraft only provides the engine, you need either the FcMP (FreeCraft Media Project) OR THE ORIGINAL WC2 GAME (NORMAL OR EXPANSION CD), SO FREECRAFT CAN EXTRACT THE NECESSARY FILES."
Re:Way to go, make them all martyrs. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:just a little update! (Score:2, Informative)
Freecraft gives you the option of using Warcraft II artwork IF YOU OWN THE GAME. You can run a script and it will extract the artwork off of the CD. Otherwise, you have to download their rather bad looking art pack.
Re:Way to go, make them all martyrs. (Score:4, Informative)
Bnetd was a promising Battle.net clone server with additional capabilities that Battle.net did not provide. In the last moment of bnetd development, bnetd developers were implementing their *own* protocol which will enable multiple bnetd servers to communicate to each other. As a former Bnetd Free server administrator, I was anticipating for this feature but it just had to die out.
What Blizzard did with Bnetd project was simple. They just *threatened* to sue the main developers. Actually, they did not sue anybody. But the threat was enough for the developers to give up their projects because they were not legal experts, nor did they have enough money to hire lawyers.
Did they do anything wrong? Absolutely not. Blizzard would have lost the case if both parties had gone to the court.
In fact, Blizzard could have participated in the Bnetd project and run their second-tier Battle.net servers with bnetd. That's the good thing with opern source. However, Blizzard just killed the project, thrasing all the efforts and achievements with it.
I am afraid the same thing will happen to the FreeCraft project. I haven't played it, but I am sure FreeCraft has something different or even enhanced from the original WarCraft. Does Blizzard have the right to kill these features too? I don't think so. If Blizzard wants its copyright respected, it must honor other's.
Re:For non-Gentoo users (Score:2, Informative)
The text that you bolded does not imply theft. "the additional media packs" have been designed independently by the FreeCraft project. The engine has also been written by them. So, the entire bundle FreeCraft + FCMP is not 100% property of FreeCraft.
The only issues are issues of whether making software clones is allowed and improper naming. There is no theft involved.
If clones are not allowed, then say goodbye to projects like xpde, scummvm, samba and even wine. I think Blizzard went way over their line here...Can the FSF attorneys help out in this case?
Official Fork Of FreeCraft: Project Inferno (Score:1, Informative)
HAHAHAHAHAHAH (Score:1, Informative)
The first article is about the "evils of the RIAA/MPAA". The next article will be about the next MUST HAVE ANIME DVD THAT EVERYONE MUST GO GET DROOL!
If you're looking for consistancy, you've come to the WRONG place.
Re:Yeah thats what happened with Linux right? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bnet issues (Score:3, Informative)
I'm the first person to opt-out of any profiling, *except* when it is by a company that I feel I can trust won't abuse my information by selling it on or direct marketing to me. Blizzard is one of those companies that I feel I can trust since they have consistently produced the best games in the genres (IMHO, yours may differ), have innovated, and have provided high quality, always on, high bandwidth BattleNet servers.
Cube (Score:1, Informative)
Here's the <a href="http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/index.php4"&g
Re:If you dont plan to buy any other Blizzard game (Score:3, Informative)
There are? I can think of CrystalSpace, and Quake II as the only decent open-source FPS engines (and none of them is that good, compared to the likes of DoomIII, HL2, Halo2, etc), and Freecraft was the only decent RTS engine. Is there some secret 31337 open-source engine repository I'm missing out on?
Yes, there is Neoengine [sourceforge.net]. It's decent, check it out.
Download Full Source Code Here (Score:4, Informative)
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/mai
Re:Bullshit (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Way to go, make them all martyrs. (Score:3, Informative)
In the case you mention, they were not trying to stop pirates, they were obtaining names and email addresses for the purpose of supporting their Starcraft customers who were having issues connecting to Battle.net.
Nor did they stop because they were "criticized", they stopped because they lost a lawsuit over it.
Relevant link. [cdmag.com]
In more recent years, to better judge the hardware capabilities of their customer base, they've started an opt-in program where general information about your computer system can be collected and submitted to Blizzard while applying patches to their software.
So in a sense they're still collecting similar information, with the main difference being that no individualized information is gathered and it is entirely opt-in -- you can apply the patch regardless of your choice.
And more than likely the "litigious and scammy" party here was the lawyer who brought the lawsuit. Undeniably Blizzard was in the wrong, but barring any evidence suggesting that their intentions were malicious, I think it's safe to say that ultimately they had their customers' best interests at heart.
Re:"Plays Warcraft 2" (Score:3, Informative)
"While I think this is a bit of a shame, you have actually answered your own question. For a twenty-player LAN game, you need exactly one WC2 CD to get the media from, which is 19 less than Blizzard implied in the license."
You could play a game with 1 cd before, not with 19 people at once, but that is only because the game didn't support that many. They even made it so you could install "friend" version os the game. Same with starcraft. However, Blizzard is no longer a consumer oriented company.
Re:If looks a LOT more than trademark... (Score:2, Informative)
Otherwise you might realize that that's a realtime screenshot of freecraft running with the content OFF OF AN ORIGINAL WARCRAFT CD.
Point being that it's to play WARCRAFT NATIVELY ON LINUX.
DUH!
Re:name change? (Score:3, Informative)
VAGUELY similiar? It looked like they sawed it down and copied it exactly. Sorry, but even if they wrote their own code and did their own artwork, it still looked exactly like WC2. I dont think any other industry allows people to create a fake lookalike product, so let them go make fake purses or something.
The look-and-feel lawsuits were lost by the agressors over a decade ago. It is quite clear that you can duplicate functionality from the ground up, as long as you copy neither code nor images.
Does anybody know where there is a copy of the letter? This strikes me as something that could be fixed.