Usually I never find time to play games anymore; most of my conscious time is spent working for Free Software and related issues. The rest of my time generally goes to reading, riding my motorcycle or doing Aikido. Also I discovered running for myself this year. For whatever reason, today I felt like none of these things and wanted to check out available Free Software games.
Using aptitude to check for installable Debian packages, I found the "freecraft" packages and gave them a try. Quite a nice job, I have to say. My congratulations to the developers — and my deepest sympathies, because when I looked on www.freecraft.org, this is what I found:
This domain is available. Please submit your proposal to: [...] If you're wondering what happened to the old site, please read this: FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard [...]
Yes, apparently Blizzard shut down this Free Software hobby project by threatening them with the big legal stick.
That got me curious and one thing I found out that people have taken the engine and started a new project with it: Stratagus. This may be a hobby project, but it looks quite professional. Check it out.
I have to say that I really liked the WarCraft games when they first came out, but this behaviour by Blizzard is really off-putting. It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… Did Blizzard really feel that threatened by a group of nerds who liked the game so much they wanted to make it more popular by improving it?
And Blizzard does seem to have a track-record for hostile behaviour. Following up on that brings us quickly to Florian Müller who has (in the name of the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign) asked the Free Software community to vote for him in the "European of the year" election. This article quotes some of the things he said about Free Software. It has also been reported on LWN.net.
Since Michel Rocard is also nominated, that would be a much worthier selection and if all of this had been about making a stand against software patents, that is who Florian should have suggested — not himself.
And as far as Blizzard is concerned: I don’t think I’ll buy any of their games ever again.
