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Notes -
Another variant of the "paved with good intentions" problem is what happens when the underlying technology just changes. Minecraft's server infrastructure has been undergoing a pretty wide variety of modifications, sometimes for good reasons (proper user IDs), sometimes for more mixed ones (chat reporting as an anti-grooming... and anti-privacy matter), and sometimes for bad reasons (pushing toward the Bedrock model). Do the old versions count as meaningful different products? There's enough of a 1.7 following (and even a Zontargs beta 1.2 following) that it's happening, but that's unique to Minecraft's scale, and I'm not sure it's meaningful as a legal scope to care about. In turn, though, it's not hard to imagine bigger differences that would undebatably matter.
Server infrastructure licensing tends to be a nightmare. I've had specific database implementations that were licensed per-core, per-developer, and prohibited redistribution of executable code. I even had one case where the license didn't transfer with a disk drive replacement, though I think that company's gone under or been bought out since. It's become less common, thankfully, but it's a far cry from the typical library file where you're typically only charged per-developer or a single fixed cost.
That's not insurmountable, and City of Heroes was very infamously leaked multiple times, and ended up getting a weird level of permission to operate, but it's a big hurdle. Even if the source code for Tabula Rasa fell out of the sky -- and NCSoft has very strong reasons to not want that to happen -- I wouldn't expect it to have enough of a following to become active again.
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