Nostalrius/MaNGOS/GPL

[Hobospices]

Just some thoughts: If Blizzard really has "lost" all of it's server code for vanilla, as I've seen claimed, one possible tack for Blizzard to take would be to use the MaNGOS emulator with Nostalrius' changes to the code.

One big obstacle to this that I can see is that the MaNGOS emulator is under the GNU Public License (GPL), the terms of which specify that all code changes released publicly must also be released as source code under the GPL. If Blizzard wanted to use Nostalrius' work to date, they'd have to accept that the work would need to be GPL'd and made publicly available. All future work done to the MaNGOS emulator by Blizzard for maintenance and fixes would also fall under the GPL and would need to be released as source.

I doubt that Blizzard would be OK with publishing source code that it's paid development staff worked on. I also don't know if the Nostalrius devs have checked their changes to the MaNGOS code back into the MaNGOS source tree.

A possible solution might be for MaNGOS to re-license under BSD-2 or Apache, and for the Nostalrius team to re-do their work under revised licenses too, but there might be issues with GPL still being applicable. It seems to me that this would be a real challenge to Blizzard leveraging the work Nostalrius and MaNGOS have done to provide legacy servers. This is probably one reason why Blizzard claims it would take so much work to get legacy servers going again - they'll probably insist on using their own code only.

Anyway, just some random thoughts about what the Nostalrius team might need to discuss with Blizzard. Very excited about the news that Nost and Kern will be talking to Blizzard, and looking forward to the results!

[r00ty]

Regardless. I call bs on their claim to have lost code.

For the program codecode I'd expect them to be using source control since they started. I know at work we used source control since the late 90s.

If they weren't, I'd call them nothing less incompetent.

Their databases, however they're arranged I don't know. You can apply source control to them. But not so easy as code.

[dst]

As a software developer myself I can assure you that the "lost code" statement is complete bullshit

[digpoe]

On the topic of GPL, Nostalrius may also breaking the license, if they use a modified MaNGOS core. However, if the Nostalrius team re-wrote their emulator from scratch (if I remember correctly, they said that it shares 'no original code' from the MaNGOS core, so they may have?), they would be able to choose their own license, meaning that they could choose something like the MIT or Apache license.

Also, Blizzard would probably be fine with working on a GPL'd project. Big corporations like Microsoft also work on open source projects, most notably .NET Core, which is MIT licensed - and these are paid engineers who work at Microsoft.

[Hobospices]

Also, Blizzard would probably be fine with working on a GPL'd project. Big corporations like Microsoft also work on open source projects, most notably .NET Core, which is MIT licensed - and these are paid engineers who work at Microsoft.

The other most popular open-source licenses - MIT, Apache, BSD-2 - aren't nearly as onerous in their terms as the GPL. None of the former require public availability of code changes made to the original source, and they don't automatically place the changes under the license. I've led multiple development projects - we can work with most other open-source licenses, but the GPL has always been too much of a headache because of the code-change terms.

I think Blizzard probably wouldn't want to go with an emulated server anyway for several reasons (I agree that the "dog ate my vanilla server code" thing is not believable), but I think the GPL issue would be foremost among those reasons.

But if Blizzard will not use the Nostalrius code, not sure what they are going to discuss with them. But looking forward to finding out when they share the results of their conversations - this is the most promising indication of legit legacy servers yet, and for that alone the Nost devs get a lot of respect and gratitude from me.*

* Plus providing me with a year of great, stable and well-scripted vanilla play, of course

[digpoe]

I think Blizzard probably wouldn't want to go with an emulated server anyway for several reasons (I agree that the "dog ate my vanilla server code" thing is not believable), but I think the GPL issue would be foremost among those reasons.

Yeah, I also think that going with an emulated server would be a bad choice (consider the amount of people that Mark Kern was talking about in his open letter) because it would be too slow for that number of people. I presume that Blizzard's servers have something like clustering as a built-in so it would be a lot faster.

[theluda]

What should I say? MaNGOS and our work on all this has been completely left out of all this.

For us it would not be an issue to relicense the cores to something more suitable but since we have not been asked, and also Nostalrius is apparently ignoring the thing, they will have to either rewrite the thing (which I doubt is possible within reasonable time since current Nostalrius server is not really much different from MaNGOS) or would have to work on original code from Blizzard (which surely ain't lost).

Anyway... this is more or less like fucking hundreds of MaNGOS developers who worked for everyone of you for free in the last century.

[ceoddyn]

woah people are breaking an overbearing ridiculous software license... on the internet no less!?

[digpoe]

woah people are breaking an overbearing ridiculous software license... on the internet no less!?

It's not a 'license'. It's a copyleft.

[Hobospices]

What should I say? MaNGOS and our work on all this has been completely left out of all this.

For us it would not be an issue to relicense the cores to something more suitable but since we have not been asked, and also Nostalrius is apparently ignoring the thing, they will have to either rewrite the thing (which I doubt is possible within reasonable time since current Nostalrius server is not really much different from MaNGOS) or would have to work on original code from Blizzard (which surely ain't lost).

Anyway... this is more or less like fucking hundreds of MaNGOS developers who worked for everyone of you for free in the last century.

Thanks so much to you and the entire MaNGOS team for all of the work you guys have done through the years - I know that servers like Nostalrius, Kronos, etc. wouldn't be possible at all without all of the work the MaNGOS folks have done.

That said, can I suggest waiting until the Nostalrius devs talk to Blizzard to get feedback? If Blizzard does decide to go down the emulator path to leverage Nostalrius's work (and yours), obviously they will have to come to the MaNGOS team for re-licensing, since Nost's work is built on your emulator. And there may be legal concerns for the Nost team that have prevented them from releasing their source changes under the GPL yet.

I do agree that the Nost team (and other teams who've built on MaNGOS) should make their source code changes available under the GPL as soon as they can - a license is a license. I have trouble seeing Blizzard agreeing to maintain and fix GPL'd code, though - I think if they decide to do legacy, they'd magically find their "lost" old server code, but who knows?