Saga of Ryzom, Free and Open Source Software?

chew827 writes "Nevrax has been suffering bankruptcy and is in the process of liquidation and are trying to sell the Saga of Ryzom, the #3 rated MMORPG on mmorpg.com, to any prospective buyers. A group has assembled to try and raise enough funds to buy the intellectual property and open it under the GPL license — something Ton Roosendaal did for Blender."

Evil Plan

[PsyQo]

Blizzard buys it and then shuts it down to eliminate the competition. It is evil, but hey, it has been done before and they have cash-a-plenty.

Not a guarantee

[El Lobo]

Making a project Free and/or Open Source doesn't automatically makes it better no matter what some zealots may say. In this case, a MMORPG project may or may not be suitable to such a change. The advantage of MMORPGs in the form that we all know is that one or several servers are run by an entity/company by its rules and the server rules are stricytly controlled by them.

Open Source almost always equalös division and we will see millions of variations of modifications that will be incompatible with each other and that will bring down the quality of the game.

I beg to differ..

[CptnHarlock]

Of course there will be "millions of variations" (heh, dream on.. :P .. hundred(s) at the most i guess), but all the bad ones will die out or just be played by the gangs that cooked them together. The good ones will attract more players and developers and thus - evolve. Also, open source software being used on a server doesn't mean that a server admin can not be BOFH:ish and impose strict rules.

Cheers..

Slashdot... good work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming that link worked when this was posted, has it ever occurred to any of you that the Slashdot effect is a very irresponsible way to kill websites that either aren't hosted on powerful servers or can't afford high-throughput hosting?

For this kind of thing, I would say it'd have been a much better idea to either let people do their own legwork or host a temporary mirror of the relevant article rather than bringing down the little guy without even thinking about it.

It's already GPLed

[_KiTA_]

I could see some other, dumber, companies doing this, but Ryzom is a niche game, there's no way they'd waste money to but it just to shut it down.

I find it interesting to note that Saga of Ryzom's parent company already GPLed the engine -- but offers a non-GPLed version for a fee:

http://www.nevrax.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php [nevrax.org]

So it should be trivial to get the end product.

the nature of software development

[micromuncher]

The attempt to hit OSS is really a recognition that the game needs a LOT of work in a short period of time, more than anyone is likely to put into it ($).

The market is pretty much saturated with EverQuest and WoW. There is huge money and tons of time behind polishing these apps. Even lesser crud like GuildWars.

You can't do A1 titles on a shoestring budget, and if you build it they don't always come because you need to support it. (So capital and operating costs...) So they're looking for a buyer; and one buyer is suggesting an OSS because its sisyphysian in nature.

There are other open alternatives around. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_g ames [wikipedia.org]

The story of some of them is the same; source company can't keep the burner going without income so does whatever it can to keep the dream alive.

Software development is almost pure labor. Labor is the most expensive part of any endeavor. You can't take from the huge pot of $ without an equal amount of $ comming in. And there is a boatload of competition.

Re:Obviously there's no benefit...

[Kyokugenryu]

The reason I play WoW is the massive community, the insane amount of content to cover, and most of all, the PVP. When I played CoH, there was no PVP, so I wanted nothing to do with it. City of Villains added it, but I can't be arsed trying it out. NCSoft has a far superior game in Lineage II, which is the best PVP game I've ever played. Guild Wars has decent PVP as well. WoW's PVP is fun, but it's nothing compared to L2. PVP is the main reason I keep a sub for L2 AND WoW.

Re:Not a guarantee

[ImTheDarkcyde]

making something Open Source does not make it free- look at quake 1, 2, and 3. Source Code freely downloadable, but not the game content.

Re:As Nevrax's former CEO & founder

[chew827]

As a member of the NeL community this effort signifies great hope for me and my project. We've been in the NeL community and contributing bugfixes and updates to the engine that runs Ryzom for over 3 years. The community has supplied the engine more than 1k bugfixes in the 6 year lifespan of the GPL'd version of the engine and all of this with dwindling interest in the community from the company, as Olivier Lejade stated. For more than 2 full years we were next to ignored by the company (except for the wonderful support and help from Vianney Lecroart and Olivier Cado) but we continued. Between this thread and the threads raging on the ryzom.com forums I'm surprised at the treatment this idea has been getting from the user community and others considering the numerous contributions we, the open-source movement, have already made towards this game. Whether Xavier's group can maintain a viable commercial entity doesn't matter. By contributing funds to his group you're not helping him buy Ryzom - you're helping everyone buy Ryzom. Any person here, with some expertise and financial backing, could run their own commercial version of Ryzom if it were GPL'd. A lot of comments have been made about the "chaos" of opening up Ryzom. Hundreds of players contributing code and compromising the integrity of the codebase, etc. A lot of projects do very well if they have a strong maintainer, a bright core team and very well founded peer-review practices. We submitted over 1k patches (as I stated earlier) to Nevrax and we never once compromised the integrity of the end-product. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people contribute to the OGRE but it still remains a strong, viable open-source project which is being used extensively in the commercial arena because Steve (Sinbad) is a good maintainer. Likewise with Linux and Linus. As far as the financial probability of Xavier's group managing servers - I can't say whether he has put a lot of thought into that or not. But by pledging and helping Xavier's group buy and open Ryzom you won't have to rely on Xavier alone to run a Ryzom shard. If Xavier cannot manage to do this Ryzom does not die with him (much like it may die with Nevrax) - anyone will be fully able to take up the torch, commercial or free. Olivier, thank you for your post, it means a lot to us in the community that you started so many years ago.

Re:Whee, another fantasy MMO? Where do I sign up?

[Red Flayer]

Frankly, I can't think of many reasons to play this over WoW (and I don't even play WoW).

Well, if the content (& source) gets GPL'd and some of the servers turn out to be free-as-in-beer, that can be a pretty compelling reason to play this over WoW.

I mean someone has to pay for the bandwidth and servers to host it (it's an MMO after all), so it seems likely that they're going to have to have a monthly fee still.

If that were to happen, I think it's likely we'd see different pricing structures from different suppliers... for me, a per-hour fee might be ideal, while serious grinders would enjoy unlimited access for a monthly fee. Either way, I don't think I'd end up spending $200-300 per year to play the game a couple hours a week, which is reason enough not to play WoW, IMO.