he obligations have to be considered during development.
They should be, but my understanding is that there’s only a penalty if they kill a game without an EOL solution, and what their EOL plans are don’t need to be complete or even stay the same during development. The wording is really flexible here and allows companies a lot of room to explore different options.
If a company can’t redistribute the server code, their options include (and there are probably more):
- write and release a functional replacement
- document the API spec for a functional replacement and help the community develop it as the EOL approaches
- cut out the server bits, or have them gracefully fall back (e.g. for something like Dark Souls, drop the MP feature)
- find a replacement that allows redistribution and make the necessary changes before EOL
That’s certainly easier to do at the start, but my understanding is that the obligation only kicks in once the servers are shut down.
And yes, it’s not “free”, but it’s basically free for an indie shop that likely built the server from scratch or used something FOSS. And that describes PS.
9bananas@feddit.org 3 days ago
yes, that’s pretty much correct.
and i think i misunderstood the part about the obligations only kicking in after service ends; you are right about that.
yeah, there’s a lot of wiggle room; the proposal is pretty generous!