OpenMW, an open morrowind reimplementation

Nicolay Korslund korslund at gmail.com
Sat Jun 7 03:10:51 PDT 2008


Chris R. Miller Wrote:

> Very very cool, though I do wonder about the legality of what you have just done.  I seem to remember a large number of commercial EULAs being more or less Xerox copies of each other, and all of them very expressly disallow reverse engineering of any kind.

Well, that's a very valid point. I'm not a lawyer so I can't definitely say anything
about the legality of the software. Technically it is probably already in violation
of the DMCA just by allowing access to the data without a copy protection
scheme.

That being said, openmw does not do anything that hasn't been done by
other software for years already (I did very little of the reverse engineering
myself), and there are similar projects (like ScummVM) that are going strong.
Furthermore, I'm not based in the US. I honestly don't see how openmw could
possibly contribute to piracy or hurt Bethesda Softworks in any way. In fact
it's more likely to increase the shelf-life of one of their products, but that
doesn't mean they will see it that way.

But I have no reason to make enemies with anyone, and I will do what they
ask me to, in the worst case take it down (but I hope it doesn't come to
that.) One thing to be very careful about though is trademarks, since
companies basically _have_ to protect them or else they risk losing them.
That's why I've called it OpenMW, but I will even remove the MW if I have to.

Nico


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