The Free Ryzom Campaign and the Virtual Citizenship Association
On 3 December 2006, three partners signed a total takeover offer for Nevrax, then in receivership. The first was the campaign's association, the Association pour la citoyenneté virtuelle, founded the same day and later known by its English name, the Virtual Citizenship Association; its president, Xavier Antoviaque, signed for it. The other two were Valentin Lacambre, and Mekensleep France, the studio of Olivier Lejade, who had run Nevrax in its first two years. The campaign posted the documents on 7 December. They are in French; the campaign's wiki has a partial English translation of the offer.
The partners would form a new company, SAS Ryzonel, with 150,000 euros of capital, 50,000 from each. Valentin Lacambre would run it, with Xavier Antoviaque and Olivier Lejade on its board. They offered 50,000 euros for Nevrax: 30,000 for its tangible assets and 20,000 for the intangible ones, among them the rights to the Ryzom source code, its art and ryzom.com. The price could be raised substantially after a one-week technical audit, once they were sure they could move the servers.
The plan had four points: a smaller team, the game as free software, the free software community to make up for the team's size, and a service business in free software so that other games could be built on the same technology. With that, the partners expected to break even at 2,000 paying subscribers.
Three offers went before the court. On 21 December 2006 the campaign announced that Gameforge's had won: the other two had offered more money and kept more of the staff.
The forum thread where the campaign published the documents was never captured. The discussions around it were: the hearing of 5 December, the court's decision and what came next.