blackrazor wrote:Well, both themanaworld.org and themanaworld.net are valid servers, with all the same data as of March 9th, 2013, and from there it diverges. Most of the players are playing on themanaworld.org from what I can see. In my opinion, the admins from both servers are engaging in petty kindergarten-style flame-wars, taunts, mud-slinging that would have gotten normal players banned under ordinary circumstances. It seems that sanity has taken a vacation from both places, and I would recommend playing on Evol or Land of Fire, or maybe something completely different, until things settle down and people decide to behave themselves and enforce the rules of civil behavior.
I am starting to think that neither TMWC nor Platyna deserve the server player files, and that the players should elect a new set of admins that will avoid starting anymore senseless crap and will honestly try to unite the community, heal the wounds, and encourage meaningful content development that the players can notice and enjoy.
From a quasi-legal (I'm not a lawyer, and I doubt anyone here has the money for an international business court case), both the forum data (all these posts) and the server data (player saves) are not covered by GPL. Every group or committee running this project, from Elven, Bjorn, Jax, Platyna, GHP, TMWC, etc was irresponsible not to ever make a constitution clearly defining the ownership of those files and rules for changing admins and hosting, so now we have this kaka-storm as a thank-you for that awesome level of foresight.
The only clear thing is that Elvenprogrammer owns the domain name themanaworld.org. One could make a sort-of legal argument that Platyna owns the files, since she hosted the software on her machine for years, in the absence of any formal agreement, contract, or constitution. She claims furthermore that Elven and Bjorn abandoned the project and their stake in it, and have only come back recently, to settle accounts with her, and because there is now actually something tangible over which to fight, which wasn't the case when they left.
Elven, Bjorn, on the other hand could (and likely have) denied Platyna's claims, and could still make a claim to the project, as original propagators of it. Elven, in particular, has some legal muscle regarding this, since he owns the domain name themanaworld.org, which was used as TMW's official domain for all these years.
Lately, I hear that the project belongs to those who develop its content, which sounds awesome cool in theory, but in practice means that any rogue developer that makes a substantial improvement or change in the future and remains active, can then lay a claim to ownership.
Heck, while we're at it, let's say that the project belongs to the community, and hold nominations and then elections for our admins, in the same way as we do for GMs.
I don't really know who the project belongs to, and I'm starting not to care anymore, either. All of have effectively destroyed the dream of OSS that it would be a grass-roots empowering and community-owned wonderful happy utopia. Instead, you have found a way to make it filthy, sneaky, dirty, nasty, just like the real "law of the jungle" corporate world, to which this was supposed to stand in stark contrast.
Seriously, with all this nastiness from all sides, how are any of you better than each other? How are any of you better than a pay project from the corporate world. There used to be a credo here, that you worked with everyone, even if you had differences with them. Maybe it was always a lie, carefully hidden, but now it is a lie, laid bare for all to see. You should all (admins) be ashamed of yourselves for destroying such a nice thing and for failing to make a constitution that would have removed all this ambiguity in the first place.
I think we need to start over. i am disgusted by what I see here now from all the people in power.
At least a single post that makes sense. I completely agree with you.
Anyway the fight is useless since, as you said, none "team" would be able to pay an international court case, and anyway no one clearly owns the files. The only solutions seems to be, either to reunite the community, which seems pretty impossible from our currently babyness-behaving admins, or to accept that there's now two servers.
I'm quite sad to agree with that other point too (because admins or i don't know which kind of people that has responsabilities shouldn't behave this how they currently do), but the only war-end solution seems to throw all of our current admins to get fresh ones that would
certainly handle their job way better than they (currently) do.
That's surely pretty undoable as players have nearly none rights. Though, it makes me laugh a lot when they say : " We need developpers, people that could create new content ! "... My question is : " What will you do if you keep or get developpers but you have no users (players), to use your content ? ". The answers seems pretty clear to me : it will simply be the end of TMW, and nothing more.
Keep paying attention to users, which are in the end, the only ones that allows something to survive and to expanse. This applies not only on computing-things, but also on everything else on our Earth.
Edit : Orthograph...