Copyright code audit

[Benzi_Junior]

In this forum post Mountain talks about a need to perform a code audit to make sure that no copyrighted code is being distributed with FAF.
What are the conditions, I mean how does one identify the copyrighted portions of code.

I would like to know what needs to be done in order to alleviate the steam account linking constraint so I could help speed things along.

[Geosearchef]

The patcher needs to be finished. It needs to be able to detect the locally installed FA version and ship the correct patch for that.

The patches won't contain any copyrighted content, only the changes between the normal version and the FAF version.


https://github.com/Brutus5000/deltaforge

[Little Miss Murder]

I assume this does not affect Steam versions?

[Geosearchef]

Euhm, why shouldn't it affect the steam version? That's the issue. People may have different versions and therefore the patches need to be different.

[Brutus5000]

The game version distributed by FAForever depends on code originally written by GPG and therefore copyrighted.

Our developer community does not have the knowledge and power to rewrite the whole game code under a free license. The original code was modified in multiple points to enable hooking in of custom code, so that we do not need to modify that many original files. And we only distribute those files that we have changed. But that doesn't matter. Strictly speaking, a single file containing a single line of copyrighted code would be enough to cause legal issues.

As such the idea is not to stop modifying the files, but to alter the way we bring the modified file onto the user's computer.
So instead of downloading the modified file from the FAF servers, in the future, you will only download the binary difference between the file that is on your computer and the file we want you to have on your computer. The assembling of the desired file will happen locally on the user's computer.

The additional complexity here is that there is more than one version of Forged Alliance installed on people's computers. There are multiple retail versions (the original, a gold edition, steam edition, etc.) which contains different versions. So before we can start to distribute patches we also need to make sure that all users work on the same baseline code.

This is basically what I am trying to achieve with my project deltaforge. I have updated the readme to give a little more insight on how it's going to work.

[Cuddles]

Yea paying $2 on steam for a game you play allot is really a pain.

[Geosearchef]

@Cuddles

Technically steam linking doesn't change anything about the leagal situation.

[ZLO_RD]

Yea paying $2 on steam for a game you play allot is really a pain.

it adds addictional step to registration, and people often have trouble with steam linking.
afaik it is only about 2$ on sale, often it is about 5-7$, and there might be new people who are forced to pay for game that they nothing about.
many players are kids and don't have much money.

[Brutus5000]

many players are kids and don't have much money.

But they bought the game 10 years ago in real stores *and* are unable to redeem it on Steam?
In general, I agree that the steam linking is annoying (also from the support side). But that argumentation is just nonsense.

[Cuddles]

I don't think it's anything to do with some misguided social activism against steam or money related problems, more likely ban circumvention or smurffing. Both points to mental disease. Maybe that's unfair, who knows. Honest explanations is not forthcoming and administrators is bound by non disclosure.

Sorry for hijacking OP. feel free to have my posts moderated.