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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the cry-moar dept.

As if Star Citizen didn't have enough problems, now its developers are being sued by Crytek:

Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.

In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.

Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 15 2017, @08:42PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 15 2017, @08:42PM (#610444)

    Assuming the Lumberyard engine is fully legal, and that the developers abandoned the original CryEngine for Lumberyard, I don't see how that angle holds any water.

    You're free to write a piece of software built upon a GPLed codebase, and then later replace that codebase with some other roughly drop-in replacement that you can redistribute under some other license. So long as you *completely* remove any (outsider's) GPL-derived code they no longer have any hold on you.

    Having used GPL code in the past doesn't "infect" your code with the license - your code is still *your* code, and you can do whatever you want with it. At worst, *if* you distributed the combined work(and thus activated the relevant GPL clauses), you'd then have to share that *specific* version of your code under the GPL. But that's only relevant to other people - as the copyright holder you can do whatever you want with code you wrote yourself.

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