Thanks all for the nice explanations.

But one more question then: If only the engine is open source, but the rest isn't, who is funding the whole project? A fully open source game would be made better by a lot of people (for the hardware, the one or other guy would have a machine run the whole day, I could imagine). But how does this work with PlaneShift? Who does the work on the server software? Who runs the official servers? Who pays for the closed source work? And how can it be that the game is free to play then?

Don't take this as critics or suggestions, only as questions.

Hi,

(if you don't want to read anything, just read the bolded question )

I'm new to this game. I read that the official server is offline due to technical problems and that there's no date or time known yet when it will be up again.

So my question is, since this game is open source, is the server software also available to the public? So that I could install it on my own machine and configure the client so that it connects to localhost. Of course, this would not be very multiplayer-like, but I'd like to try the game now and get used to it, so that I can directly start playing when the official server is back up again without having to wait now or without having to learn anything from the scratch on the real server.

Thanks for your answers.