That's some great detective work. I think I'd followed that trail before, but didn't have it all written out like.

So it seems that the licence holder is closed. My only concern is if New World IP, LLC exists as some legal entity that someone could acquire in the future, and therefore acquire the licenses it held.

I'm no legal expert, so not sure if them being closed means they're gone, and all the licenses with it, or if there's some legal status that they're in. Effectively not operating, but still an entity that could be purchased. That would be the only thing that could jeopardise the licence in future.

I think that it's probably the case that the licence was void some time ago, but noone in the EECH community has ever had the legal knowledge to look into it properly, or sought any legal advice on the licence status.

I wonder if we'd be able to engage with anyone at GoG.com to ask their advice, as they sell DRM free games, and must have come across licence issues in the past.


As for putting the code on an open repository - it would get around the current access issue. However, as a community we'd have to accept that their could be a possibility of multiple versions of the game being distributed, and all of the headaches that would cause. There's no requirement for anyone working on the code to be a member of this forum, or even communicate what they're working on. In fact, I remember a couple of years ago, there was someone posting videos on youtube of work they were doing, but there was nothing on the forum about it. I think that might have come from the current Github repo.

I've recently got back into playing IL-2 1946. There are many mod packages available for that, some of varying quality, and some of varying requirements. It was actually a bit of a headache to get them working.