Multi Theft Auto - San Andreas Goes Open Source

dan writes " Multi Theft Auto is a third-party modification for Rockstar's hit title Grand Theft Auto San Andreas — and it has become open-source after over four years of closed source development. As a (somewhat) regular player of MTA since the early days of GTAIII, this hit me by surprise, somewhat." (The news is on the project's front page, from which dan extracts more details, below.)

dan continues: "Some of the interesting parts of the post: 'Today we are marking a new milestone in the history of Multi Theft Auto. After over 11000 revisions since 2004, contributions by over 16 world-wide developers, 1554 files and well over 550.000 lines of mostly C/C++ code, we have made the decision to re-launch Multi Theft Auto as an open-source project.

By open sourcing our project, we are encouraging anyone who is willing to participate in this project, to participate. For that reason, we are not 'just' offering our source code: we have also opened our bug tracker and will be offering public access to our nightly build system that will be compiling a build every day (and has been long used for testing purposes). This way, any developer will be able to run the latest revisions, file bugs or submit patches.

This is particularly exciting given that the released source is based upon the MTA Blue core, which in theory can be applied to any single player game. The source will no doubt be useful and provide foundations for future projects and the progression of the mod itself.'"

Only Cowards are Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the Google Code site for the project [googlecode.com] and see some of the committed files in the repo, you'll notice REAL names with REAL email addresses, and thus your point is moot... and I shall forever be a coward.

Summary Lacking

[ovanklot]

FTA:

"Multi Theft Auto (MTA) is an open-source software project that adds a full multi-player network play functionality to several of Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto game titles, in which this network play element is not originally found."

Ah, now I get it.

svn

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the command to check out the source:

svn checkout http://multitheftauto.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ multitheftauto-read-only

Re:Summary Lacking

[Enderandrew]

When I first saw the headline on my iGoogle page I read it that San Andreas itself went OSS. I was very disappointed when I reread the headline and summary.

Re:Anonymity

[ZorbaTHut]

If someone wants to shut down one of these projects, all they have to do is claim that they wrote it.

Proof of identity besides, how exactly would this work? All major open-source licenses (including the GPL) are irrevocable for the code they were distributed with. They can claim they wrote it all they want - they can't force anyone to take it off their sites.

If someone wanted to shut down the project, they'd have to:

* Claim it was theirs
* Claim that they never intended for it to be distributed
* Explain how it is that this group, which has been distributing it for a long, long time, managed to be the sole source of distributed binaries for months (years?) without the original authors ever caring
* Explain how this group got ahold of the sourcecode in the first place

There's enough laugh-test issues in there to make any such attempt essentially impossible.

Basically, put it this way. If these people, the actual developers, want to de-GPL it in the future . . . they can't. Cat's out of the bag, ain't going back in. If they can't do it, what makes you think an impostor could?

Re:...but they do help.

[coresnake]

Actually the MTA servers are all full of cheaters who use weapons hacks in nonweapon areas etc. anyway so I wouldnt worry about that.

Re:Missing the serial number generation, incomplet

[Anonymous Coward]

The serial number generation isn't missing and is actually stored in a dll that hasn't been made open source

Re:Anonymity

[JernejL]

It's not even all their code, there is actually code in there that belongs to rockstar which they gave to them before hot cofee thing, i doubt they got permission to opensource that, it looks like a legal suicide for them

Re:Anonymity

[dintech]

Let me clarify, he means that someone could use a pseudonym to poison the project with copyrighted source. Obviously, as you say, the person doing this isn't concerned about the project. You're forgetting that it's the others using their real names on something they care about who will suffer because of it. OK, so you could identify who submitted the dodgy code and remove all of their contributions but it might not be sufficient by that point.

Re:Anonymity

[Kjella]

GPL is a valid license. If the originator of the source already obtain a GPL license, then automatically all subsidiary works is GPL too. You cannot claim any of the code is yours. To apply for GPL license, the originator usually applied for a copyright using real name of course. After that, all subsidiary works become GPL automatically. The holders of GPL works are not all anonymous. FYI some of them have real copyright for that work.

Do you work for SCO or the Microsoft FUD department by any chance? GPL code can only be legally combined with other GPL(-compatible) code. If I have the copyright on code A (other, non-GPL license), and you have the copyright on code B (GPL) and some third party combines and creates A+B, then that work isn't GPL. You can't steal my copyright by extending your license to my code. Whoever combined those works broke copyright law and the work A+B has no legal license at all. I can issue a takedown because it violates my license, that you have a real, non-anonymous copyright on your half makes no difference at all.

Re:Anonymity

[3p1ph4ny]

Because they'll probably be sued in the US federal court system for an amount over $20. Read the 7th amendment. IANAL, etc.