https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/ea-shuts-down-fan-run-servers-for-older-battlefield-games/
Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts.
"We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."
EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown, which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games. To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @01:11PM (1 child)
Occam's Razor says the biggest reason Microsoft is trying to push customers to The Cloud is simply recurring revenue, not data mining.
With respect to Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution and running old versions indefinitely, it's not practical. It takes time and effort to keep supporting the old software. If you want to put together a distribution that does that, nobody is stopping you. You could even personally dig up the Ubuntu 10.04 ISOs - I'm sure someone has them - and maintain it yourself. But it's not reasonable to expect Ubuntu developers, or SUSE, Arch, Debian, Fedora, whatever - to automatically do that for you. And on the bright side, the work currently on Snaps, Flatpak, AppImage, etc... etc... will probably make it so that maintaining old software is less work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @02:32PM
While true, it misses my point of the vendors planning to obsolete what you have, and then killing it off so you *cant* use it, even if you choose to. Sure, time marches on, as does technology, and it makes things less viable over time, but at least that is not 'by design', and just an artifact of advancement instead.