You've left one thing out of the equation. Cash. In fact that equation goes something like this:

M$= Cash

Idealy for them, this function is increasing throughout its entire domain. Offering to purchase the rights shows that there is still interest, hence, the price will go up. Though FL may be fading off, be assured that they will milk the cow until it implodes. After that they'll do anything, pawn the spare boxes off to General Mills to put cereal in. The bottom line is, if they don't control the rights, they don't control the money, and that's not very equitable for them.

Lets suppose that they did accept an offer from you, or the community. The process would take months if not years of legal litigation, lawyers, and again, a whole lot of cash. Millions of dollars, something that, even collectively, this community would not be able to assemble redily, if even legally. Esky's sale of bred rabbits and Tawalkanistan's oil exports can only get us so far. Nothing can satisfy the greed. Sorry for the dire outlook, but the truth is sometimes painful.





Not Enough.

Edited by - J Dawg on 2/16/2006 9:34:02 PM

I'm afraid Dawg is correct. The only possible way of getting the source code would be to start your own country, seperated from the legal battles of the rest of the world (Or get offplanet, either works), get an insanely good computer, and reverse-enginner the code, before redistributing it.
As you are outside Microsoft's legal juristiction, thier only choice to get back at you would be military action, which i doubt the U.S. Military would consider to be, a priority.
This has two possible outcomes:
1) microsoft ignores it, community makes FL open-source, say hello to FL2, an 'FL3a' through 'FL3 for dummies'
2) microsoft gets pissed, finished FL1 with all the proper stuff, changes code so our mods dont work. makes FL2, releases it in complete defiance of the reverse-engineers.

Either way, we win

Araina, I'm quite sure Microsoft has their own military. They've just decided to spend lots more $$$ that they plan to get through Vista or some nonsense to expand their 'compound' not thirty miles from where I live.

this is starting to sound like a plot for Austin Powers 3
as for the source / rights well im sure they would not be keen on letting that go for anything we could afford
if they did and fl2 worked they would look silly ......(hmm id better not go there)
if it didnt then so few people would know about its true nature that they would be worried of rumours of an inferior m$ product ........(ok lets not go there )by virtue of the fairly well known m$ product fl 1

Hey I am sure you can buy FL rights if you have 2 things.

1.) a name
2.) Millions

I had a few million the other week, but I spent it all on Hello Kitty merchandise.

We're talking Yen here, right?