The overall project status?

[Eero R]

They've misunderstood a post you made a while ago. (I did too...)

[Naksuapina]

As for making a professional game, it depends on what you mean. If you are talking about making money off the game, that would be illegal so of course nobody would be doing that.

Why would making commercial games with SCI studio be illegal?

If i'm understood correctly, SCI Studio, and the template game are licensed under GPL. If somebody wanted to make a closed source game with SCI Studio, he'd need to rewrite only the template game, which would be rather easy, as there would be already be a template game, which could be used as a reference model. No copyright infringements done.

On the other hand, making commercial games and applications that are under the GPL is not a problem either. See MySQL, it's GPL and it's commercial.

-Naksuapina

[Chris Cromer]

As for making a professional game, it depends on what you mean. If you are talking about making money off the game, that would be illegal so of course nobody would be doing that.

Why would making commercial games with SCI studio be illegal?

If i'm understood correctly, SCI Studio, and the template game are licensed under GPL. If somebody wanted to make a closed source game with SCI Studio, he'd need to rewrite only the template game, which would be rather easy, as there would be already be a template game, which could be used as a reference model. No copyright infringements done.

On the other hand, making commercial games and applications that are under the GPL is not a problem either. See MySQL, it's GPL and it's commercial.

-Naksuapina

What you don't understand is that SCI is NOT owned or created by Brian. It was made by Sierra Online not Brian. SCI Studio is GPL... but the engine is NOT. Our selling games using the engine would be illegal regardless of whether we used the template game. So how do you think you are going to go about selling these games when it would be illegal to distribute the engine? And without the engine the games can't run.

The executable that runs the games, as well as the file structure for storing the data of the games is not under GPL or even created by Brian.

[Naksuapina]

What you don't understand is that SCI is NOT owned or created by Brian. It was made by Sierra Online not Brian. SCI Studio is GPL... but the engine is NOT. Our selling games using the engine would be illegal regardless of whether we used the template game. So how do you think you are going to go about selling these games when it would be illegal to distribute the engine? And without the engine the games can't run.

The executable that runs the games, as well as the file structure for storing the data of the games is not under GPL or even created by Brian.

FreeSCI (or, CABAL::SCI now) - a GPL'd engine. So, where's the problem? (According to your previous posts, you should be well aware of that project.)

-Naksuapina

[Chris Cromer]

And those are built off of the original SCI interpreter and work in the same way as it, still illegal. Regarless of how you look at it, selling games that use SCI is illegal.

It's like me stealing somebody's product, making my own based on it and works with it's data, then GPL'ing it. I didn't own the original product, so it is illegal regardless of the fact that I wrote my own intepreter... because it still uses the original file format as well as general way of working.

[Cloudee1]

Now Chris I think even you are stretching it a bit, you don't like to be wrong do you  , me neither so that's not a bad thing. Here's what I think:

Just because I make a cake out of the same ingredients as a sara lee cake doesn't mean I can't sell it, I just can't call it Sara lee.

I seem to remember reading that atari once tried to sue sierra for a straight up copy of a pac man game, sierra won. What is legal or illegal is to be determined by the courts.

If I have gone through and changed every line of code, there is no way anyone could come back and say that they are the same code, even though the structures are the same, they're not. Now I'm not sure what freesci has done in they're project but if it has been rebuilt then no one can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that they are the same code when they aren't.

Knowing the Sierra of today do you think for a minute that they would even allow they're intellectual property to be GPL'd

FreeSCI (or, CABAL::SCI now) - a GPL'd engine

Regardless, my final thought: You could probably get away with selling it but you probably aren't going to be able to sell any.

[Brian Provinciano]

Now this topic is getting off-topic, but in case you guys didn't know, Sierra patented a bunch of it's algorithms and such. Secondly, had a competing company put out some adventure game based off a reverse engineered SCI, they could definitely be sued. Although, now, I doubt Sierra would really care. However, if you started making a bunch of money, they might notice and decide to take action. Your call. The fact is that whether they win or not, it doesn't matter. They'll just take you to court until you have no money left.

BTW, if you did make money from it, you should really donate a chunk of it to FreeSCI, as programmers in the real world get paid very well for what they do, as without the FSCI team, you wouln't be putting out a game at all

[Naksuapina]

And those are built off of the original SCI interpreter and work in the same way as it, still illegal. Regarless of how you look at it, selling games that use SCI is illegal.

It's like me stealing somebody's product, making my own based on it and works with it's data, then GPL'ing it. I didn't own the original product, so it is illegal regardless of the fact that I wrote my own intepreter... because it still uses the original file format as well as general way of working.

Copyright doesn't work that way. Copyright protects the actual content, not ideas or looks'n'feels.

Sierra has copyrights on their own interpreter, and FreeSCI guys do have copyright to their interpreter. FreeSCI guys are licensing their interpreter under GPL, so anybody can take it and distrubute it under the GPL terms. If there happens to be a commercial game (ie. non-GPL'd) bundled with the FreeSCI engine, there might be a copyright violation towards the FreeSCI developers, but it certainly isn't sure that they'd win the case, as the developers of the commercial game would most likely ship the FreeSCI engine right under the GPL terms.

About patents, it would be interesting to hear what patents Sierra would have on their algorithms and such. First of all. patents are always geographically constrained. For example, in Europe you usually can't patent algorithms. Then, if Sierra really had some patents on the SCI technology, they'd most likely be already, or really soon expired.

Brian however has a point about the US law system: it doesn't care whether or not Sierra had premises to win the case, they can still outnumber most of us in the number of lawyers.

Well, this discussion is on a theoretical (and off-topic as well level, as Sierra doesn't seem to be interested in the almost 20 year old games they have, (and most likely, they are wise in their decision of letting people hack around with the old stuff). And then, the SCI environment is very unlikely to be the environment of creating the next block buster game. As a programming exercise, and a hobby, both the FreeSCI and SCIStudio are most likely really entertaining projects.

-Naksuapina