Free Ryzom!
In the autumn of 2006, Nevrax, the studio that made the MMORPG The Saga of Ryzom, filed for bankruptcy. Ryzom had been running since September 2004, and its players were a small but loyal crowd. Nevrax had also published the engine behind it, NeL, as free software, and a community of developers had grown around that code.
On ryzom.org, some of those people started the Free Ryzom Campaign: former Nevrax employees, NeL contributors, Ryzom players and free software advocates. They wanted to buy the game in the bankruptcy proceedings, publish its code, art and tools as free software, and run its world as a project of its players. Blender had been bought back from its investors by its users in 2002, for 100,000 euros. Ryzom could be next.
The site went public on 27 November 2006. On 3 December, the campaign founded an association, the Association pour la citoyenneté virtuelle, and the same day it signed a takeover offer for the court, together with Valentin Lacambre and Mekensleep, the studio of Nevrax's first CEO. They offered 50,000 euros for the company. Pledges kept coming in: on 13 December the Free Software Foundation announced a pledge of 60,000 dollars, and within 25 days the campaign had gathered more than 170,000 euros in pledges. Three offers went before the court, and on 21 December the campaign announced that Gameforge's had won. The other two had offered more money and kept more of the staff.
The people behind the campaign did not stop there. In January 2007 the association moved to virtualcitizenship.org under its English name, the Virtual Citizenship Association, to stand up for the rights of players as citizens of the online worlds they live in. ryzom.org kept the campaign pages online into 2011, and then went quiet.
This site restores both, from the copies the Internet Archive made at the time. Each restored page shows the date of the capture it comes from.
What happened to Ryzom
Gameforge's French subsidiary ran the game for a while. When that purchase fell through, Ryzom went back to the liquidator, and on to a new owner, Winch Gate. In May 2010, Winch Gate published the source code of the Ryzom client, server and tools under the GNU Affero General Public License, along with much of the game's art under Creative Commons.
Part of what the campaign set out to do came true four years later, by a different road. The NeL developers, who had carried the engine on as OpenNeL after Nevrax's successor left it behind, merged it with the published game into Ryzom Core, which the community still maintains.
In the archive
- The Free Ryzom Campaign: the presentation, the social contract, the FAQ, the budget and the first pages of the list of contributors, as they stood when the campaign closed in January 2007.
- The offer made to the court, with its statutes, financial plans and CVs.
- The Virtual Citizenship Association: its presentation, first actions and social contract.
- The forums of both sites, read-only, from November 2006 to 2008.
- The wiki, in English, French, German and Spanish.