It will vary from country to country. I'm blessed enough to be living in canada:

"In Canada software is protected as a literary work under the Copyright Act of Canada. Copyright is acquired automatically when an original work is generated, the creator is not required to register or mark the work with the copyright symbol in order to be protected."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright

The 'original' Sim City wasn't dos based. You'll have to go further back then that to the Commodore 64 version.

v5.48.2 should work in SP, 5.48.3 might not (i cant recall)
But ya best bet is to try with a vanilla install and see if the problem persists

That would be great. We decided to leave it off our site because it was http only.

So a while ago I submitted a request at DuckDuckGo for them to add a !bang command for the-starport. I'm not sure when but sometime within the last month or 2 they activated it

For those that don't know, if you start a websearch with one of their !bang commands, it redirects the search to a 3rd party site.

For example
Typing this in the search engine: !tsp offsets
Takes you directly to here (starport's search result page)

If the search bar in your browser is set to use DDG instead of google or bing (like mine) it works there too.

Its been doing that for a while the global server seems broken.
From the active servers list:

Last Update: 10/31/2017 1:23:36 AM CE(S)T
Last Global Server Contact: 10/1/2017 4:20:14 AM CE(S)T

Last contact was 1st of the month, our servers been endlessly trying to connect to the GS

This...my thoughts exactly, and is the direction I've been focusing on for our next version, rebalancing PvE for a real challange (historically our mod has been more PvP.... PvE was lacking), in tests now hostile players are just another blip in the scanner, no more a threat then the npcs.

A while back I started implementing a basic rpg system..skills, traits and experience system with critical hits with hook..its pretty rudimentary so far, skills are broken down into piloting (one for each ship class), and weapons (gunnery and guided), % chance of xp granted on hits, various traits effect the odds or add critical hit effects: lucky break (small chance of rerolling any skill check), finesse (effects from successful rolls are higher), shield by pass critical hits, etc etc
It was more of a 'wonder if i can make this work' question then a actual useful system...it was side-tracking me from other tasks so I didn't refine the concept, but its defiantly doable.

Something I've been working on for a while now when I find the time, a python plugin for use with FLHook 2.0 (svn version). Basically it sends hook event callbacks to python, and allows python to run various FLHook functions.
Most (but not all) event callbacks are supported, passing along all arguments (structs are converted to python 'collections.namedtuple' objects). Everything is done using python's C API, so theres no need for any 3d party libraries like swig or boost. (python source code is required to compile though)

Its far from perfect yet but does work as intended, and you'll have to excuse any inproper cpp style, its not really my area.

Python Plugin on Github