AzureMS Open Source Development History
After numerous discussions with Brandon about going open-source, SoulGirlJP finally made an announcement on RaGEZONE on the 9th of September 2020 about going open-source with Azure v316. However, contrary to expectations, the version released was an early build of the project, and did not include many of the fixes/features that came later. When quized about this, SoulGirlJP gave markedly different explanations on different occasions - as such, the actual reason behind this difference is not well understood (at the time of writing).
It should be noted that many of the contributors (including Brandon, Desc, and KOOKIIE) have had their permissions revoked, and can no longer update/maintain the project (see here where KOOKIIE posted an issues post WRT to outdated docs, alongside all changes that needed to be made in order to remedy the situation, which ended up being closed without explanation nor remedy).
In July 2021, SoulGirlJP expressed that the project is abandoned, and that "nobody was really contributing to it". It should be safe to hence consider this a dead project.
A_Duck (also known as a_real_duck or Dylan) forked SoulGirlJP's open-source repository on the 18th of March 2021. Dylan thoroughly enjoyed the AzureMS v316 experience and thought it was a shame that it was discontinued. This inspired him to attempt to re-create AzureMS v316. Ex-Azure staff were supportive of this move. Noting his desire to have all the Korean text in-game replaced with English translations, KOOKIIE generated a set of reference files highlighting all files that contain Korean characters in the repository (along with their line numbers), to simplify Dylan's workload. This was because the AzureMS source code used large .java classes spanning several thousands (if not tens of thousands) of lines of code each - manually checking for Korean text would have been a gargantuan task in and of itself.
On the 23rd of September 2021, the then existing repository was flagged as deprecated when Dylan migrated to ElectronMS for his restoration project.
Team SPIRIT is a group of developers comprising largely of ex-Azure staff who are/were computing majors.
For a period of time, they were actively contributing to the open-source AzureMS v316 repository (despite having started their own non-KMS server), either in code or in documentation. This ended, however, when SoulGirlJP revoked their permissions (likely a result of personal feuds, which are beyond the scope of this document), despite them being the main contributors and maintainers of the repository. This move was never publicly explained nor acknowledged by SoulGirlJP.
