Dear Mr. Vogel, 

	It has been over seven years since you released Blades of Avernum (BoA), and in that time more than eighty fan-made scenarios for it have been created. In the meantime you and your company have moved on to new projects, which now include a rewrite of the original Avernum trilogy, with which BoA was associated. We feel that this game has therefore now reached a point analogous to Blades of Exile (BoE) in 2007 when you decided to make that game’s source code publicly available under the GNU General Public License. The purpose of this letter is to ask you to consider doing the same now with BoA. 
	
	There are two significant precedents of community work on code made available by Spiderweb Software. These are Blades of Exile and the Blades of Avernum Editor. While open source development of BoE has admittedly been slow since 2007, its primary goal of ensuring that this excellent game continues to run on new computers has been met, and work is underway to further modernize the code, including efforts to rewrite it to use wxWidgets and make it run uniformly on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The BoA Editor has not only been maintained to continue working well on newer computers; it has been substantially extended with features like an isometric view mode to match the game and a revamped user interface. [Is it necessary to discuss lagging Windows support, or can we gloss over that?] We hope that you will agree that these examples indicate that if the BoA code is released it will be put to productive use. 

	[Is this paragraph necessary or useful?] We would like to stress that we do not intend to lobby for the release of the code for other Spiderweb games in general. We believe that BoA and BoE belong to the same special case of games intended to be driven by user contribution which stand to benefit uniquely from community development of the game itself. Our hope is that modest efforts to improve BoA itself can significantly expand the possibilities available to scenario designers and simultaneously decrease the difficulty for new designers to get started. Furthermore, since you have stated in the past that it is not practical for Spiderweb Software to devote additional effort to creating games of this type we would like to be able to take on that responsibility. 

	Therefore, we request that you consider releasing the BoA source code under a suitable free software license, such as the GNU GPL in he near future. 

Sincerely, 
[Signatures of community members]