Commercial Game
made off OpenRA Engine
Commercial Game
Is it legal to make your own game using the OpenRA engine and release it commercially?
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- Posts: 3
- Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 5:18 pm
https://github.com/TM-PD/FirstDance (was a private github repo in the past) is an example of a (failed) commercial clone which was used in a strange in-house software as a service project to "educate" children. They probably underestimated the effort it takes to maintain such a huge project and abandoned it after some months of mostly re-branding. Sadly they never sent a single patch back to where they forked from and only released the source code after I found out when reading about OpenRA in some developer biographys on linkedin.com I had never heard of. Note: that was mostly illegal. Don't do that even if your boss fears competition. Otherwise risk getting in trouble with http://gpl-violations.org/
Conclusion: my tip is to work with us, try to include your patches into the main OpenRA distribution and use it as a basis for your mod/content. http://www.desura.com/games/publish/openra/settings might need some tweaks to allow selling DLCs. Another legal advice: it has to be a total conversion. If you earn money with trademarks and EULA covered content, the lawyers at Electronic Arts might send you angry letters.
Conclusion: my tip is to work with us, try to include your patches into the main OpenRA distribution and use it as a basis for your mod/content. http://www.desura.com/games/publish/openra/settings might need some tweaks to allow selling DLCs. Another legal advice: it has to be a total conversion. If you earn money with trademarks and EULA covered content, the lawyers at Electronic Arts might send you angry letters.
Interesting topic.
In other words, would a commercial project have to implement non-proprietary alternatives to them?
Out of curiosity, does that include WW's own file formats like shp, tmp, aud and so on?Cmd. Matt wrote: ↑If you earn money with trademarks and EULA covered content, the lawyers at Electronic Arts might send you angry letters.
In other words, would a commercial project have to implement non-proprietary alternatives to them?
That is an interesting question. In Germany reverse engineering is legal to make your own product compatible to a competitor. These are exceptions to patent and copyright laws to prevent market failure. I don't know the situation world-wide. Plus we don't do checks if we violate software patents or similiar IP rights for every patch we recieve. This is not a corporate conducted Open Source project, but a hobbyist initiative. But I don't know of any Free Software RTS engine project that is tailored towards business friendliness. The weird Westwood file formats definitely complicate things for artists that are not used to them.