Transport Simulator

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If you bought a game under the title "Transport Simulator" you have paid money for an Open-Source, Free software which is originally called Rigs of Rods.

Since many people started wondering, we will try to explain this a bit more:

Is this legal

Our game, "Rigs of Rods" is licensed under the GPL v3. Under that license it is allowed to rebrand the game and sell it for money.

However, the content shipped within that game is not falling under GPLv3 and therefore every mod author is able to sue the company for copyright infringement.

Also, they ship no source code on the CD or refer to it in any way.

Is it morally acceptable

We are for sure biased in this opinion, as we (the development team) spent years on improving the product since 2005 (and under GPL since 2009).

The core team of the game (called the invited members, counting 49 grown men as we write this) devote lots of their spare time to add content to the game, called mods.

So lets try to think how those modders feel: someone from the UK who sells nearly everything cheap gets the great idea to sell GPL software on CD on amazon. He pulls the binary from sourceforge, buys some CD cases, prints out a nice cover image which is put together from random games found by google that fits the theme. He invents some fake company name (SIMPLEZ simulations / BJ software) and a new fake name for the game (OPAGI ADVANCED 3D TRANSPORT SIMULATOR) and puts the images on amazon.

Whenever someone of the lots of ebay shops or amazon buys this game, the central person gets the address where the game should be delivered to. He burns a CD with the content (hey, they added a crappy manual at least!) and sends it away for 17 British pounds.

So, i guess you understood by now that someone that contributed nothing to this game tries to make money from it by selling it to the public as a new game he invented.

We struggle to keep all services running, we have running server costs that needs to be paid, multiplayer servers, etc. while he tries to make a dime for his own pocket.

We, the authors of "Rigs of Rods" never saw a penny of income out of this business and we do not know who is behind this.

--Tdev 22:27, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

you can reach us via email if you have comments or questions: support@rigsofrods.com

Our very personal advice to you

TRY TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK, SEND THE ITEM BACK (they allow you to send back copies within seven days) and download a recent version of the game for free: http://download.rigsofrods.com

What it looks like

Yup, we spent 17 pounds to buy our own software to clear this up:

the box with random photos on it

the cover they used. They copied together screenshots and photos from other games.

the content of the box: with self burned CD

the CD content featuring unmodified 0.36.2 setup. (official, free downloads there: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rigsofrods/files/rigsofrods/0.36.2/)

About transport-sim.eu

we acquired the domain transport-sim.eu (which they printed on their covers) after we were notified of this in order to inform the people of all this. The domain was still free before we acquired it.

The domain redirects to this wiki page.