FOnline 2238 Licensing Clusterfuck

[lash]

In 2013, the source code for FOnline: 2238 was released to the public. After years of toil, the developers could carry it no longer. But in passing on the legacy, they also passed on a curse...

So, there's a legal clusterfuck right now. And I'm not talking about the usage of Bethesda-owned trademarks, or the usage of Fallout 2 assets... I'm referring to the Angelscript code that makes up FOnline:2238 and all its descendants.

See, when 2238's source code was posted, it was not posted with a license. No license, no right to fork. Legally, all that could be done was simple viewing of the code. That did not prevent development of Reloaded, which also posted source code (they assumed that 2238 was under a restrictive copyleft license).

However, the fork that is FOnline Forever (forked from Reloaded) has not posted source code, nor has FOnline Aftertimes (also a Reloaded fork).

So yeah. Legal licensing clusterfuck.

[devis]

It's all ogre bois

[Wipe]

Oh boy, you got it all wrong.

(...) everyone should be able to download the sources, start a FOnline: 2238 server or create their own projects based on it.

That is closest to FOnline: 2238 License you'll gonna get, i'm afraid

As scypior already said, noone from Rotators gonna sue you for using 2238 code. Heck, we always encouraged people to use it however they wanted - that's why it has been put it on Github in a first place.

What you missed here is that most of FOnline servers are developed by people which we already know from 2238 times, as many of them was well-known players. If they wanted to know more than what has been posted on forum, they just asked on IRC and got first-hand answers. And these which we don't know, know someone who already talked to us. Yeh, FOnline community is *that* small
In short, Reloaded source release wasn't license assumption but Kilgore's decision - and nothing more.

All in all, only thing you have to worry is FOnline SDK license and even that applies only if you want to run commercial FOnline project. So far there wasn't a single server like that in FOnline history, for a reasons you already pointed out.

[KardashianKim]

I thank you very much.
 Legally, all that could be done was simple viewing