Sopwith creator found
Andrew Jenner
Sopwith. It is http://members.home.net/davidlclark/sopwith.htm
What follows is the email I wrote to him, and his reply to it.
--
Dear Dave,
First and foremost I must offer my deepest thanks to you for creating
Sopwith, which has given me (and so many others) endless hours of
enjoyment causing little red planes to crash into each other.
If you have read much of sopwith.org or alt.games.sopwith, you will
undoubtedly have encountered my name. I am the one responsible for
starting the latest wave of excitement about resurrecting Sopwith by
reverse-engineering the original 2 games and reconstructing the source
code in C. It is a very strange experience to be addressing someone
whose head I have spent so many hours trying to get inside.
We have great plans for the next incarnation of Sopwith - I will not
dwell on them here, as they are well documented elsewhere and you may
know about them already (although I'd be very happy to go into great
detail if you'd like me to). As you own the copyright to the game (and
hence to the code I have recreated), we can't put any of these plans
into action without your go-ahead.
Ideally, what I would like you to do is to release the source code of
Sopwith under a free software license such as the GNU GPL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) thus guaranteeing that the
source code will always be freely available to any programmers who
want to tinker with it.
I eagerly await your reply.
Yours,
Andrew Jenner
--
Hello Andrew
Thank you for the kind words on Sopwith. As you can imagine, I've been
pleasantly surprised with the following Sopwith has generated. I can't
believe the number of times I run into people who have fond memories
of the game. It's an honour and a pleasure to see people
reconstructing and evolving the program.
Now, for the legal side. Unfortunately, I do not have the legal right
to authorize use of or distribute the code. I wrote Sopwith as a
multi-user demonstration for BMB Compuscience's Imaginet network, and
wrote it while under the employ of BMB Compuscience. After my very
amicable departure from BMB to test the waters as an independent
contractor, I requested and received permission from BMB to hold a
copy of the source code, and to be able to modify and distribute (at
no gain) the program as I felt appropriate. I do not own the program,
just the occasional changes I have made to it.
BMB Compuscience has since been bought out my another firm, so I am
not clear on the legal status of the program. I took the step of
placing my current version of the program on by web page since I
discovered Sopwith was already being distributed on the web. To my
knowledge, BMB or its purchaser never officially released Sopwith as
freeware. I will undertake contacting the prior owners of BMB to get
their impression of the legal status of the program, and to determine
if they feel they have any continuing interest in it.
As for my personal attitude towards what you are doing, I support it
wholeheartedly, subject to the work being done with the agreement of
all parties who have interest in Sopwith. I am a firm believer in the
author's (or the author's employer's) rights to intellectual property,
and have trouble with the mass distribution of software as freeware
without the consent of the owner of the software. My own personal
attitude towards Sopwith is that it should be made available for
distribution as long as no one makes a penny off of it. If people are
paid for the program, or are paid for its distribution, then the owner
should be compensated.
While I try to track down my old BMB cronies, if there is anything I
can do to help you along, please let me know. Sometimes a little
history into the program can lend some in-site into why things are the
way they are.
For example:
The cows are actually oxen. The R&D department at BMB had paired desks
facing each other; the fellow sitting across from me was Dave Growden.
Dave was one strong dude, whenever we needed something moved, Dave was
the man. He soon acquired the nickname "Ox". Dave was my primary
tester, sacrificing countless hours getting scores into the thousands,
only to have the program go south on him. In his honour, oxen were
introduced into the game.
I noticed on one page that there are suspicions that Sopwith made it
onto Atari computers. Although BMB did develop Imaginet for Atari's,
Sopwith was never ported. However, it did make into a prototype IBM
PCjr ROM. An engineer put the card together for me, and I modified the
code to provide the correct plug-in ROM signatures. The prototype
still sits on a shelf in my office.
Sopwith was written in Computer Innovations C with some assembler
modules. My current version had been recompiled under Microsoft C 6.0,
Microsoft's last DOS only compiler. I occasionally put together
personalized versions of the program with customized title screens and
shrapnel icons. It is my intent to replace the multi-player serial and
Imaginet portions of the program with TCP/IP support, but I admittedly
lack some knowledge in how to do this in a DOS program.
I hopefully will be back in touch in a few days with more information
on the legal issues. Hopefully things can get cleared up so you can
steam ahead without concern.
Dave