The Free Ryzom Campaign

Ryzom is a multi-player online game operated by a company called Nevrax. It has a dedicated following, but has never reached anything close to the level of popularity seen by some of its competitors. In fact, it has not reached a sufficient level of popularity to keep Nevrax alive; that company has found its way into French bankruptcy court. The future of this game is currently in doubt.

Interestingly, Ryzom has some free software roots. Just over six years ago, LWN's Development Page carried a notice about the release of NeL, Nevrax's GPL-licensed library for the creation of online games. Richard Stallman once visited the company's office. It would appear, however, that Nevrax, once it started accepting venture capital, lost interest in free software. The GPL releases slowed; instead, Nevrax started offering closed-source versions of its code. Whether Nevrax would have succeeded had it maintained its free software approach will never be known; the proprietary plan has visibly failed to work, however.

Some of the original developers have not lost interest in the code, however, and they have a number of friends. Together they have founded the Free Ryzom Campaign. The plan is to raise enough money to buy Nevrax's assets in bankruptcy court, release the code under the GPL, and take the game into the future. The inspiration is clearly the Blender project, whose code was bought through donations in a very similar way back in 2002. The Free Blender project surprised everybody by raising €100,000 in less than two months. If the Blender folks can do it, the reasoning goes, why not online game supporters? Those people, after all, are already accustomed to paying for their experience.

The first step is to sell this plan to the bankruptcy court. The Free Ryzom folks have not yet been able to release their proposal publicly, but the core concepts have been posted. There will be a non-profit organization allied with the for-profit company Mekensleep and Valentin Lacambre. With this combination, the project hopes to convince the court that it has the most interesting offer. In this way, they can also put some significant money on the table before the donations from the community come in.

If the plan is accepted by the court, Mekensleep will end up owning the code, along with the artwork, trademarks, and so on. There is some sentiment in the Free Ryzom community for transferring the copyrights to the non-profit group, but it seems that this decision has not yet been made. What is clear is that all of the code would be immediately released under the GNU General Public License (with the "any later version" language). From there, the code would be managed under the terms of the project's social contract, which is based on the Debian social contract. Among other things, it says that players own their avatars and other objects, and should be able to transfer them from one server to another.

The plans call for there to be multiple servers. The current Nevrax servers would continue to be run - on a paid membership basis - as they have been until now. But the (Linux-based) server code would be free, so anybody with an interest could set up their own world and allow access in whatever way pleases them best. According to the Free Ryzom folks (who kindly talked with your editor about the project), multiple worlds were a part of the plan from the very beginning. One of the long-term goals is to revise that vision, creating the prospect of a community-driven metaverse of cooperating game servers.

In the near future, however, a number of other problems need to be solved. There is, for example, no Linux client for Ryzom; one assumes that, once the source becomes available, that little problem could be taken care of. Some players are concerned about the security implications of opening up the source; in particular, they would hate to see the gameplay ruined by a proliferation of robots. There is, inevitably, some third-party code in the mix which would have to be stripped out and replaced. There is even some tension within the community about whether the primary goal is the preservation of Ryzom or the freeing of the code.

Before work can begin on any of those issues, however, a more immediate problem must be overcome: the project must convince the bankruptcy court that it is the best custodian for the code. The proposal was considered on December 5, along with proposals from other interested parties. The current word is that some sort of decision will be announced sometime after December 12. Should the project prevail in court, it must then collect enough donations to complete the purchase. To that end, the project is now asking for donation pledges; at this time, all that is needed is to promise to give some money. Should the project go ahead, donors will be expected to follow through with cash. The list of pledges is quite long; if all of those people are serious, the project will be off to a good start.

The free software community has accomplished a great many things in recent years, but the creation of a high-quality online multiplayer game is not among them. This is an important area, even for those of us who lack the time or interest for gaming; the sorts of virtual worlds being created for gamers can only become more prevalent and important in coming years. They may be the only place where we'll be able to find our children. Clearly, we need some good, free virtual world infrastructure. It would be nice if we could develop it entirely ourselves, but the fact is that software cast off from corporate failures has long been an important source of code. Perhaps this particular corporate disaster could yet yield benefits for the free software community.

[The images all come from the Ryzom screenshots gallery, which has many more.]

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