News on The Saga of Ryzom and Nevrax going into receivership

A pro-opensource user community [1] has started an initiative targeting to
set one of the most popular MMORPGs free under the terms of the General
Public License.

It started when the company behind The Saga of Ryzom, and service provider
for the online game, called Nevrax, announced [2] on Monday 20th November on
ryzom.com official web page that they are entering a liquidation process,
entering negotiations with interested companies whom might take over the
current project.
Facing this situation, players, some old nevrax team members and other
opensource sympathisers have positioned in favor of a free software
alternative for the game. The people at ryzom.org are trying to raise
pledges for donations so they can try to face the costs to buy the
intelectual property rights for the game, allowing them to publish it under
GPL licenses as well as trying to set a non-profit paid game service with
the robustness it requires.

The goals of the group are reflected on a Social Contract [3] they've got
published on their page, which compromises them to release the source code
and all other material under GPL or GPL-like licenses, like it's the case of
other well known software packages, so it would become one of the new
generation MMORPG games entirely mantained by the open source community.

This group has a very short time to try to raise funds (through community
pledges) to become a solid option to be taken into account on the next few
days, when the liquidator will have to decide whom to sell the game and it's
ownership.

This initiative, on another hand, isn't a pioneer, since there has been
previous actions like this one, namely the Blender project, which succeeded
in a similar situation, allowing Blender to become one of the most powerful
tools in the scene.

References
[1] Free Ryzom Project - http://www.ryzom.org
[2] Nevrax news regarding liquidation -
http://www.ryzom.com/news/archive/2006/11/20/important-in...
[3] Free Ryzom Project Social Contract -
http://www.ryzom.org/page/project_socialcontract