jwueller
They don't care about GDPR penalties? I'm going to need a source for this one.
- Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial: You're probably already running the Kubernetes config on the cluster anyway. Just release the server binaries/config/docs. Laws are also usually not retroactive, so negotiating licenses that allow for this in the future seems trivial too.
- You don't lose IP by distributing anything, just like you don't lose it for distributing the client. I don't own Ford because I bought a Ford car. The only thing licensed IP in a product does it that you can't sell it anymore after it expires. It has no effect on previously sold copies.
- EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses. They like to call it a service, but that doesn't mean that it actually is, legally. As opposed to SaaS, games are sold as a product with no expiration date. The EULA/ToS also always contain clauses like "terms can change at any time for any or no reason", which is inherently invalid. So the whole EULA/ToS could be invalid on its face too.
- This is just about basic ownership rights. If it's a rental/service (with a disclosed price for a specific time period), then it's fine. Otherwise it's a product and you have to abide by the regulation for products. Anything other than these two options is inherently unfair, because you can't assess the value of something if you don't know how long it may be used for.
Basic property rights are not up for negotiation.
Note that it's not about running servers for all eternity. It's about patching out the requirement of an _official_ server and/or releasing dedicated server software, at least _after support ends_, like games have done for decades already.
MMOs can be both. If it quacks like a good, it is one, no matter what they say in the ToS/EULA. Stuff like World of Warcraft would likely be unaffected, because they are up-front about the duration you pay for.
The only thing that makes sense to compare when talking about pythons performance is how many instructions it needs to compute something, versus the instructions needed to compute the same thing in C. Those are probably a few orders of magnitude apart.