WoW Scape Judgement

[Schmoozerd]

perhaps we should implement a few basic cheats to mangos

like vladimirs birthday or similar

[TheLuda]

We should add a remote mangos event, right away in assembly code and dump it inside. Each week the happy mangos community raises a beer to the server with goblin fireworks. Somewhere along those lines

[roby10]

that sounds nice... only if i'm invited

[Unkle Nuke]

The fact is that no matter where you go on the Internet, you'll always find some ass who's stealing other people's ideas and hard work for his own profit.

Do the work for the work's sake. It will be a legacy more enduring than any donation dollars.

[TheLuda]

IMHO it all works out well. mangos is the most stable community I've ever seen. No daily bash times, or worse things, and thats a definite win.

[jaggex]

IMHO it all works out well. mangos is the most stable community I've ever seen. No daily bash times, or worse things, and thats a definite win.

Agreed, I think mostly this is because of that all leaders and developers of this project have a very correct attitude and the same goals. Every time there's a reason to flame or accuse someone/something it is immediately interrupted. Its not only a stable but a clean community, no code-stealing, no dishonesty, no bad relationships with others. Ultimate goal is to learn and this is one of few projects of this size I've ever seen that actually has managed to accomplish this. I'm actually amazed by mangos, watching sooo many other projects failing after only a few months or a year. Mangos is the only one still standing and despite that still having a very bright future.

This have inspired me to start my own open-source projects and has taught me most of the things I need to know about how to run a good and healthy open-source community.

Cheers & Thank You MANGOS

[Sword1776]

You don't want to know how many public mangos realms exist... and among the existing ones there is probably only a 1/3 actually giving credit. The remainders just claim mangos sucks, and their core is their own work. mangos could sue them all for copyright infringement

Shall we ?

Well, mangos is GPL, so they're only violating the license if they redistribute it (any version, theirs or the official one) without the corresponding source code. And the GPL actually suggests that you claim maintainership of any modified GPL software you distribute. Claiming authorship is another thing... dishonest, but not illegal... unless you do it in court.

Which brings up the other problem. The copyright of mangos is not held by any one person, but by everyone who contributed, unless they explicitly assigned copyright to someone (e.g., Vlad.) So ALL of those people would have to be plaintiffs or defendants in any copyright case involving the project as a whole. A lot of commercial companies have gotten away with GPL violations (portable media players that run modified Linux software are a big one) because it's hard to find someone who has standing to bring suit. That's why GNU asks that you assign copyright on all contributions to Richard Stallman.

[Sword1776]

Oh, and I forgot to mention... the headlines I read said that this was a default judgment, which I'm pretty sure means that WoWScape didn't even bother to show up in court. That's too bad, because it would have been interesting to see how the court actually ruled on what copyright violations occurred.

I think mangos itself is pretty safe. Reverse engineering is still legal, and maintaining the db as a separate project keeps Blizzard's IP out of it. On the client side, Blizzard can't tell people what servers they can connect to any more than Mozilla can tell people what sites they can browse. The flip side, of course, is that you can't sue them, either, if they find out and ban you from retail.

[Toinan67]

On the client side, Blizzard can't tell people what servers they can connect to any more than Mozilla can tell people what sites they can browse

Are you sure of that? Players are not legally forced to play on retails servers? oO

The flip side, of course, is that you can't sue them, either, if they find out and ban you from retail.

Would they ban 500,000 accounts? I don't think so ^^ (the 500,000 is pure imagination, I don't know how many accounts are playing on private)

[Sword1776]

Are you sure of that? Players are not legally forced to play on retails servers?

Well, the whole "purchased" vs. "licensed" thing is a legal gray area. If software is purchased, you can do whatever you want with it, including hacking it. You just can't redistribute it. But if it's licensed, then you have to abide by the EULA. When it comes to first-sale doctrine, at least, courts have held that software is purchased, invalidating clauses in EULAs that forbid resale. But I don't think something like connecting a client to an unintended server has ever been tested in court.

[vladex]

good thing i have the original wow ,lol.

[faramir118]

The lawsuit talks a lot about the TOS and EULA, and makes the argument that clicking the Accept button makes it an enforceable contract.

It would have been interesting to see it play out in court, instead of a default judgement.

[Patman128]

You can make the argument that you didn't actually click accept on the ToS, and just changed the variable in the config, and therefore didn't actually accept any contract.

[Toinan67]

Hmmm I don't think this would be a valid argument

Just creating a wow account makes you accept the contract

[FeRkEl]

but if you hav no account on retail you won't accept the contract

[Schmoozerd]

and very importat is also, that a contract is only binding in the parts where it doesn't conflict with real laws (at least that's the normal way for many countries)

[Toinan67]

So, question is : is there any part where Blizzard's contract conflicts with the real law?

[Ever]

Connecting your client to any other socket then what is owned by blizzard is against their ToS yes.

That does not mean that they have any way of telling if you did or not. Just make sure to clear your client cache before changing your client back to an official socket ;p

[Wojta]

Why do you think blizz left realmlist adress in text file so it can be really easily changed? Yes, address is different for every language version, but they also have to change binaries (or at least I think so). "Realmlist.wtf" is like "Please, change me" file...

[Tibec]

"Realmlist.wtf" is like "Please, change me" file...

That's right

[Toinan67]

Tibec you just wrote exactly the same post I was writing.

[Curious]

Reverse engineering is still legal, [...]

In the EULA it is clearly stated that reverse ingineering is illegal on WoW Client

Learned that in the pdf posted by roby10.

So everything implemented in MaNGOS was deduced without reverse engineering or packet sniffing (also illegal ).

[caeruleaus]

what he is saying is that, though it's stated in the eula, it is not illegal by country law. Basically all they can do is ban your account if they find out you have one but they can't really do anything regarding legality issues.

[Curious]

Anyway, as evil Patman said you could argue that you didn't agree on anything by modifying the config file. I don't think that somewhere there is stated that you have to clic on Accept and if so it would be a paradox since you would have to accept to click on accept by clicking on it.... still following ?

[TheLuda]

Regarding reverse engineering one should remember that some countries have laws giving students the right to reverse engineer and circumvent protected systems for the sole purpose of learning. IMHO that is something everyone should fight for, and the loss of this right - like for U.S. citizens - is one of the stones marking the death of democracy *sigh*