Legal costs are less of an issue than unintended consequences. Whenever you go tinkering in a EULA to change it you bring the possibility of causing other things to happen. In cases like this you end up in a situation where you can end up with several different EULAe in existence at the same time which makes things damned confusing to keep track of.

One of the strengths of the GPL is that it's been around long enough and used by enough people that there isn't a whole lot to it that isn't well understood. But make a minor change to it and you can end up with something that's no longer understood.

I think that it's just a formality.

You know how the major corporations all love to cover their asses.

My opinion is that EA isn't even in the position to push or inquire any additional stuff towards GoG. If they would, there wouldn't be one EA game here. If they could, they would have joined long ago.
The amount of power people claiming EA to have, is only topped by the amount of greed / evil the same people see in EA - and that over years if not decades, without ANY proof at all.

Seriously... it's time to let go. Either drop your silly and unproved claims or stick with it by not buying EA stuff - yes, it's really THAT simple.

It's all the same with old games. The publisher usally don't have the original guys writing that piece of software anymore around, sometimes don't even have the sourcecode (the industry is famous for NOT preserving it's legacy for a reason), heck there are several examples of companies relying on cracks to remove DRM.

Yet you fear they write additional code and implement it? You're trying to live up to your nametag, being Monty-Pythonesque?

Bingo. The EULA is just the legal crap that every piece of copyrighted Software has.
EA, when releasing this game for gog, just slapped on their current EULA instead of the original one the game had back in 1997.
I don't fully trust EA either,( I am pissed that they apparently are keeping GOG from including the Expansions for their games in the release ) but this is sheer paranoia.
And if you have the brains to back up your GOG purchase on A DVD ROM, removable Hard Drive or name your favorite backup storage medis, even If EA put DRM in in future versions, it would not impact you.

Not exactly. For me an EULA is a declaration of intentions. If the EULA says they may spy on me, I want to know if they can do that or not. And that is the point of this, to ask gog whether EA has the technical means to do so.

I usually end up wondering if I have too much imagination or the rest of the people have too little. Network activity is just info that gets out of a program with the target IP starting each package. If you want to force an old game to pass through a network, you only need to wrap some piece of code around the original program that takes the network data, redirects it to another IP (EA's server) and the server redirects the important info to the original target IP. I really don't think it's science fiction.

As for whether EA has power/is evil/greedy, well, I will only tell you they OWN the multiplayer of all the games they have released in the last years. They shut it down, they block it for second-hand users, they tell you what companies you can hire for dedicated servers, etc. So, yes, I'd say there is enough proof that they have power and are greedy.

I don't think you're quite cynical enough. I tend to work under the assumption that most companies (and especially companies like EA) will try to do whatever they think will make them money (or fulfill some executive's power fantasies), regardless of whether they telegraph such intentions via an EULA or the like. Basically you should already be watching your back regardless of what an EULA says or doesn't say. Now, if I suddenly notice that some GOG games are trying to phone home then I'll be one of the first to raise a stink here (and I'm sure many others would do the same), but currently I haven't seen any of the GOG games (including the new ones from EA) trying to phone home.

I suppose what I'm saying is that unlike some others, who think you're being too paranoid, I think your fixation on the EULA is a bit silly in that it stems from you not being paranoid enough.

As a (untested or not) legally-binding document, isn't the older version superseded by a newer one?

Not a good game on the PC, by a long chalk. I definitely won't be buying that PoS crappy console port that doesn't work, AND requires an EA account to play online/store in-game cars and whatnot.

Which puts us back at the problem of proof - so go ahead and point to the one game, where the previous networkcode now points to a "EA only server". It's not hard to check if the original version allowed user-run servers / LAN / whatthef**kever and now forces users to a specific EA server.
No proof? So I still call it a witchhunt.

Sucks, no doubt about it. Still, EA isn't the only company doing so, but those others seemingly doesn't concern somehow. Which boils down to "EA = more evil than others" which is plain stupid.
Now where and which concerns this any GoG-releases now? Not at all so far? Still a witchhunt.

And again for christ's sake: either drop your silly and unproved claims or stick with it by not buying EA stuff - yes, it's really THAT simple.

One real irony is that at least 2 of the EA GOG releases so far are DOS games, and I doubt that EA is going tobother developing an on line monitoring system for a DOS product.........

Yeah EA is powerful and greedy...which is why this is small potatoes in terms of profit for them, and they are not going waste resources on trying to institute online activitation/playing for a 15 year old game.

Yeah, but it's human nature to get bat-shit crazy over stuff they can't control....so they invent stuff that makes them seem to have some control. Hence the increasing amount of idiots going all tinfoil hat on everything they can from Kennedy to 9/11 to oil spills to cold fusion to the gods know what.... "It's the cell phones, DUDE! They're using them to control our thoughts!!!1"

O_o

Kinda pathetic, but mostly harmless to the majority of people. Just laugh at them, and carry on regardless until something changes. One way or t'other.

I'm sorry if I haven't expressed myself properly here. I am sure that the new EULA is the binding legal document indeed (as the other one isn't even distributed, is it?).
I simply wanted to point out that they could save the cost of creating a new EULA especially for this niche market by re-using the original EULA of these games. Because cost was mentioned as a determining factor for applying a new standard EULA to these old games.

You make a valid point.

I see most problems with online multiplayer games. These games will probably never come to GOG if they only have dedicated servers and require an online account. These services are almost always regarded as DRM. So no online MP games here or the label DRM free would be at stake.

Actually what I like least from the points above is the consent to collecting data. That is bloody bad and intolerable. It's simply unfair. Nobody should every be stripped of their privacy like that.

Btw. EA are not the only ones with a specific license. I remember at least one other game from GOG (Atari?) with a specific license but not exactly which one at the moment.