Q&A highlight
Posted3 months ago
Key Takeaways
I wanted to clear up some confusion around FrontWars. The project isn’t part of 3AM Experiences — it’s something I helped a developer friend, Phoenix, get started with. He’s been a big fan of Terratorial and wanted to make something in a similar style.
When we began, we forked OpenFront under the licenses it was released with (MIT and GPLv3 at the time). The fork has always been public. The only mistake on our end was that it wasn’t linked on the game site at first — as soon as this was pointed out, we corrected it and added proper attribution and license details.
Since then, Phoenix has also been working on writing a new client from scratch in C++ that will use the MIT-licensed backend — this will eventually replace the existing frontend entirely.
From the outside it may look like a simple fork, but the plan has always been to evolve the project in its own direction. The initial release was put out quickly because others were also forking, and we wanted to get something playable online as a foundation.
I’d honestly love to just resolve this directly with you in DMs on Discord. But since legal counsel has already been involved on your side, it’s difficult for me to continue informal conversations — everything has to go through lawyers now.
We’re open to feedback and want to handle this respectfully — our goal is to build something new while fully complying with the terms of the open-source licenses.
“Please respond to the formal cease and desist at frontwarsio@gmail.com . All further communication must be through that email with my legal counsel CC’d.” “Please only communicate via email from now on thank you.”
Because of that, I thought it was wise to keep Discord communication paused until the legal side was sorted. I haven’t had any replies from you via email so far.
Can you confirm whether your legal counsel received my response?
Recently a game studio called 3am Experiences, owned by "Mistik" (he purchased diep.io a while back) has ripped my game and called it "frontwars". The copy is blatant - he literally just find/replaced "openfront" with "frontwars" throughout the codebase. There is no clear attribution to OpenFront, and he's even claiming copyright on work he doesn't own.
OpenFront actually made it to the front page of HackerNews a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44528943
Questions for HN:
* Has anyone successfully enforced AGPL violations? What worked?
* Given it's a Wyoming LLC - best legal approach?
* Should I pursue copyright AND license violation, or focus on one?
* Any lawyers here experienced with AGPL enforcement?
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