A few weeks ago I was re-introduced to Merchant Empires by my fellow Redux Project Administrator, Hades. ME as I remember it from a few years ago (shortly before the open source fuss) was a very complex and cool game. Unfortunately I was at the time starting a trainee contract (work hard, no overtime pay, peanuts for salary ) and never found the time to play more.

In digging around recently by way of research I was once again reminded why open source games are vulnerable endeavors often falling victim to questionable folk who have the scruples of the average ferret. In particular, the GNU GPL has no method of enforcing redistribution of modified source code (since it’s hosted, not distributed as a compiled executable).

The most popular Merchant Empires game at the moment is hosted by a group of people on the advancedpowers.com domain. My guess is that its quite a profitable game. They offer "Gold Memberships" for $6 to raise funding. The benefit of a Gold Membership is mainly that you avoid the in-game ads which spin more money from non-member players.

What’s disappointing is that this is a closed project, with no open source releases. They claim otherwise in their documentation…

"The APME Project started in 2001 as a fork of the Merchant Empires code base originally created by Bryan Burton, with the intention of creating a distributable and truly Open Source version of the game."

Fat chance.

Its already been noted that requests for the source code are ignored. Its nothing more than a group of people reaping the benefits of another’s work which was placed under an open source license. Bryan Burton gets his single mention on the website in the above paragraph. There is no other hint he might hold the copyright to a portion of the current source code. Attribution is important, but I do note Bryan never added a copyright notice anywhere in the game’s output – pity.

Of course the folk above probably think nothing of what they are doing. After all they have the source code on a private server – aren’t they allowed to change it and turn a profit doing it? Are they?

It’s actions like this that make me hope the day comes when an open source license is allowed to impose forced distribution of modified source code for web hosted applications in PHP (GPL 3 hopefully). Popular PHP web apps which decide to go open source have severe disadvantages in this respect. It’s not always obvious, but it’s a massive problem particularly in PHP games when installations are edited to remove copyrights, links to the open source, etc. A final quote from Merchant Empires real founder, Bryan Brunton…

"It’s quite ironic that a group of players took the source to the game, created their own project labeled "Open Merchant Empires", and then proceeded, after a short period of time, to not release any source or modifications to the original source."

Ferrets, Bryan, ferrets…

Related posts:

  1. New Copyright and Licensing Regime
  2. Jumping on the bandwagon…
  3. GNU GPL v3 Draft 1