Ryzom?
I am a member!
Does anyone know if Ryzom is considered unsatifactory?
They liberated the source under the AGPL, and all of the art assets under CC-By-SA 3.0. However, the gameworld was not released.
I'm not sure of the implications of that. Are they obligated to release the whole gameworld if they expect people to play on their servers? Do NPCs, quests, stories, magic spells & weapons, etc. count as a "functional work" in the sense that artistic assets (pictures, sprites, etc) do?
Does this count as SaaSS in the sense that RMS speaks of?
I was wondering that, as well.
I'm unsure of the opinions of RMS on this topic, but I consider it alright if it's possible to make your own replacement for the map data, then I consider OK.
If anyone is more informed on this topic, please comment.
I am a member!
Thanks for your reply.
I remember the FSF putting out a 'what's next' press release about Ryzom becoming free software. I knew they were working on making the 'world editor' based on QT instead of a proprietary graphics library. Sounds to me like they planned for the community to make their own gameworld eventually.
Still, I'm interested in everyone else's opinion on the ethics of Ryzom's current gameworld.
RMS does not care about the freedom to study, modify or commercially
distribute "nonfunctional works" which do include fictional gameworld
data.
It's not SaaSS, since you cannot play a multiplayer game alone: this
needs network communication with a server/peer controlled by someone
else.
(No personal opinions here: I don't play multiplayer games.)
I'm pretty sure the FSF actually explicitly endorsed and praised Ryzom when its server code was released under the GNU AGPL. There's no ethical problem with it.
The thing with the "world" is that it hasn't been released at all; you can only access it by connecting to the official Ryzom server and playing the game. This isn't unethical unless you also assume that having a program that you don't give to anyone is unethical, or that refusing to tell someone the location of an easter egg is unethical.
They endorsed it,
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/ryzom-free-software. (I refer to
that article also as their endorsement of Wine.)
Accessing their world is not like knowing that there is a program that
isn't distributed. It's more like using someone's computer for our
computing, or listening to a story that someone says. Both tasks
involve a computation done by others for us, with possibly different
ethical implications.
By the way, the FSF doesn't consider art to be "functional"; I don't know where you got that idea.