Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

The Free Ryzom Campaign that I have mentioned earlier is now officially supported by the Free Software Foundation with a donation pledge of $60.000 (which now makes a total of ca. 134.000 Euros together with the contributions by many other people).

The Free Ryzom campaign was established to purchase the online game and universe known as Ryzom, property of the now bankrupt Nevrax company, and release the entire game as free software.

As stated by Peter T. Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, the FSF considers the Free Ryzom campaign "a high priority project for the free software movement". The aim of the campaign is to publish the source code to the entire game under the terms of the
widely-used GPL, as well as publishing all of the artwork and other content under similar free licenses.

The Free Ryzom campaign represents a unique opportunity for the free software movement and the emerging free gaming field. A fully free MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) engine and client/server architecture would allow the development of a myriad of universes, each one evolving its own philosophy and unique content - but sharing in general technical improvements. If successful, this campaign would allow any user to create their own universe and produce their own content based on the Ryzom/Nevrax architecture.

The new goal is now to reach 200.000 Euros in order to increase chances to convince the judge to choose the Free Ryzom project as the new owner of the code and game data.

Pledges must be made within the next few days, since the deadline for the final bid is expected sometime before Wednesday, December 19th, depending on when the judges make their decision.

Good luck to the project!

Update 2006-12-14: Fix the numbers (Euro vs. Dollar messup). Thanks Ward Vandewege!

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