The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 68

Links OSDL position paper www.osdl.orgdocsosdleben moglenpositionpaper.pdf TheGuardian 07.08.03 Bleak future for Lara's founder Croft's developer could spell doom for the BSSKBSSSm BhHHhIhhHHh HBgj' vtlr 9HSh usBBslllflHIHHK iHrVH 'sll flB vH 3BIHH JackSchofield's column LinuxWorid www.linuxworldexpo.comlinuxworld ny03V40index.cvrt1 Stallman's Usenet post http:groups.google.comgroups? UK games market, eluded in Eidos's year-end figures, but missed that boat in Europe. That, presumably, explains why Jeremy Heath-Smith fell on his sword. Releasing a game in July, a month in which nobody buys games, makes no sense, and the decision to rush a bug-ridden game out when it could have been tied to the August release of the second Tomb Raider film, and benefited from attendant cross-promotional possibilities, defies belief. Eidos appears to have become obsessed with America, which makes some sense, as the American market is the biggest in the world. But Crystal Dynamics will inevitably Americanise Tomb Raider which is ironic when you consider that Lara was a linchpin of Tony Blair's old Cool Britannia campaign thereby destroying any remaining credibility the franchise might have in Europe.

A look at Eidos's portfolio for this year confirms a slide towards US-centricity. Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home and the game of Hollywood's remake of the Italian Job could be big in America, but are unlikely to do as well in Europe, while most of the rest of its titles are quality games that fall into niches. Apart from Tomb Raider, the company's biggest franchise is Championship Manager, but its developer, Sports Interactive, is, at the time of writing, in protracted negotiations with Eidos. Its previous contract to develop the game has expired, and rumours abound that there is some confusion over which company owns various rights, trademarks and intellectual property. Eidos could, undoubtedly, hand Championship Manager to another developer, but the franchise's fans are unusually compiler, debugger and Emacs editor, and created the GPL (General Public License) under which Linus Torvalds released his Linux kernel.

However, it could be hard to verify the integrity or even the identity of all who have contributed since. If a commercial company decided to clone a rival product, it would do a "clean room" implementation. It would have one team write the specifications for the interfaces, and a separate team one made up of people who had not seen the original code, and could not have absorbed its "concepts and methods" write the programs to match. That guarantees there is no cross-contamination. The open, collaborative nature of GNULinux's development made that impossible.

It could well be argued that SCO has not made an effective case, or writes Steve Boxer passionate, and that would be a dangerous move. Eidos clearly needs to refocus, and the first move in that direction will be an imminent rebranding exercise, primarily consisting of a new logo. Everybody hopes it manages to get back on track, as British games publishers are now so endangered they should be protected by the WWF. Compared with the likes of Electronic Arts, Activision, Sony and Microsoft, Eidos is a minnow, but it is still the biggest British publisher: Codemasters and SCi are its closest rivals. Codemasters just managed to convert itself from developer to publisher without going bust, but earlier this year, Rage which tried to do the same fell off the map.

The likes of Electronic Arts would undoubtedly snap up the Tomb Raider and Championship Manager franchises, but it is doubtful they would retain much of the rest of Eidos. It would be a disaster for the British games industry if Eidos failed to pick itself up off the floor. Core Design's Lara Croft that it has compromised its case in other ways. The Open Source Development Lab, for which Linus Torvalds now works, has published a position paper by an expert on software copyright law, Professor Ebcn Moglen, of Columbia University, see above. It could also be argued that the law is being applied against the public interest.

Everybody recognises that there are benefits to sharing programs and code, as well as music and movies, though Hollywood and the giant media corporations are trying to reverse the trend. But until SCO's case is thrown out of court or negotiated away, companies using Linux are at some (very small) risk of being made to pay for what some teenage hackers might have got up to in their bedrooms. ok Bv rnS The sacking of Lara If you spend your time raiding tombs, you are bound to pick up ancient curses. Could that be what has befallen Lara Croft? Following the farcical launch of the latest Tomb Raider game, Angel Of Darkness, Derby developer Core Design, which gave birth to Lara, has been summarily sacked by publisher Eidos. Crystal Dynamics, a San Francisco developer, will make the next Tomb Raider game, due for 2005.

This follows the news that Core's managing director, Jeremy Heath-Smith (who was also an Eidos board-member), has stepped down from both boards. Even Eidos's original inventor, Toby Gard, who left Core Design years ago, has seen all credibility ebb away, as his Galleon project has entered the realms of vapourware. And could bad luck alone explain why the second Tomb Raider film, Cradle Of Life, has posted disappointing opening figures in the US? Ancient curses aside, Lara's recent travails can mainly be ascribed to Core Design's failure to get to grips with programming for the PlayStation 2 and, as a result, both Core Design and its parent company Eidos are in a major bind. Core Design's future looks particularly bleak. Now that Tomb Raider has departed, it is known to be working on just one game, Fighting Force 3D, which, while mainstream, is hardly a blockbuster.

Eidos owns Core Design, so if the developer goes into liquidation, the publisher will surely take a financial hit. Eidos has other woes, many of which stem from the Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness debacle. Angel Of Darkness just squeezed into the shops in America in time to be in- We can bet that a popular topic at this week's Linux-World conference in San Francisco was whether Linux users should pay SCO a licence fee for Unix. (No!) But that is one of the things SCO wants, and it is suing IBM for $3bn to reinforce the point. Briefly, SCO claims that some of the Unix code, which it owns, has been copied line for line into Linux; that IBM has moved code developed for Unix into Linux; and that some Unix "concepts and methods" have been used in Linux.

While they could be hard to prove, it would not be surprising if these claims were true, because what we now call Linux started as a project to clone Unix. When Richard Stallman an- Angelina Jolie, star of the second Tomb Raider film Cradle of Life HoReuters nounced his "Free Unix!" idea on Usenet in 1983, he wrote: "Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." Stallman recognised that a motley collection of unrelated programmers would probably not be able to create a coherent system. "But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent," he wrote. "Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility.

If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU." No one doubts Stallman's integrity, or his ability to write original code: he wrote the GNU.