BnetD going to die now?

[KingBahamut]

full article over at Ars

A three-judge panel from the 8th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals has upheld (PDF) a lower court ruling that bars hacking Blizzard's online titles. Two programmers, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, created an open-source application (BnetD) that emulates Blizzard's Battle.Net, allowing owners of Blizzard titles to connect to unofficial servers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050902-5270.html

[hammett111]

full article over at Ars

A three-judge panel from the 8th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals has upheld (PDF) a lower court ruling that bars hacking Blizzard's online titles. Two programmers, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, created an open-source application (BnetD) that emulates Blizzard's Battle.Net, allowing owners of Blizzard titles to connect to unofficial servers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050902-5270.html

:mad: Q'Works Rep' :-x

What is Blizzards problem :-( ](*,) We have tried several times to port both Starcraft titles to linux and each time been rebuffed, even getting lease for the source code is a friggin nightmare!!!!! Can someone in the know tell me if Blizzard and Micro-cocks are in league **excuse the french** but I have never met a more hostile force to open source than Micro-cocks and Blizzard!!! ](*,) ](*,)

[Mishura]

I used to co-administer* a BnetD server, from just before the beginnings of the lawsuit, until a year after.

Back then, (2 years ago), it was relatively easy to get the source code, plus there was active development through various forks (PvPGN was one, but I didn't use that.. then there was another.. forget the name). I haven't done any BnetD stuff in two years, so I'm not sure how well it works now. From what I hear, WC3 support was stablized, which wasn't a feature in the later BneTD versions after the lawsuit.

Now, a Blizzard + MS thing? I don't think so. Every single Blizzard game has a Macintosh client at the same time as their Windows clients. My WC2, WC3, Starcraft and Diablo II CDs are dual MacOS/Windows CDs.

I think they are more anti-Linux than Pro-MS. They're probably more in love with Apple than anything else, but they can't say "Apple Only" because that would kill them.

One thing, every Blizzard game from Diablo II and on-ward has always been Wine-compatible. This could be a side-effect of MacOS support (OpenGL!), but there "could" be something going on where, they make it compatible with Wine, but not support a full client, due to various reasons. I could be dead wrong, and the whole Wine support deal is merely coincidence.

Anyways, BnetD can't really *die*.. it has survived in various forms, its just Underground now, like Heavy Metal music. If you want to "stick it to the man", run your own server.. its not that hard. I was able to have one hosted on a ADSL connection, and lag wasn't much of an issue.

*I didn't setup and run the server, but I helped maintain it, did the webpage, kept the idiots out, modified the ladder.py script with a graphical theme.. that sort of thing, so I can't tell you how to install and setup a server.