Articles

NAGI Legal Disccusion

A very old article about how legal NAGI really is. I've received some emails about the subject and one day I'll update this article.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Digger
3. #SDL
4. #Sarien
5. Conclusion

NAGI was created with the purpose to help fan-game developers so they had something to release along with their game. The reason why they couldn't package it with the original Sierra interpreter was because Sierra owns the copyright to it and legal issues could arise.
 
As some people know, NAGI was created by disassembling the AGI executable and recoding it in C to act the same as the ASM source. This wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to implement a lot of my own code to interact with Windows, converge v2 and v3 code, implement a crc system and other bits 'n pieces. The original sierra code also had to be debugged and the variable names had to be determined.

The issue here is that it's not exactly legal to do that with any code. It's still Sierra's copyright, although in smaller pieces, throughout the NAGI code. This, along with other reasons, is why I'm not releasing the source just yet.

However, many fan games use Sierra's sprites or other logic code and Sarien uses specs that were mostly derived from Russians who disassembled an old v2.440 interpreter. There are many examples of programs uses little bits and pieces of Sierra's intellectual property.

Page: [ 1 ] 2 3 4 5