Arcanum source code

Judging by the fact it's missing form the Terra-Arcanum download section, I realize it hasn't been released yet...
Actually I did a good bit of googling and forum searching on that one, the most interesting thing that I've been able to find was this:
http://www.co8.org/forum/printthread.php?t=2210&page=2&pp=30
... Or at least interesting when it comes to finding the source code or any pointers to whether or not it was/will/won't be released. Mostly 'tough, I found rants about the game slowing down and references to the Arcanum weapons editor's source code. The highlights of that link are that the ToEE engine is quite similar to the one of Arcanum's but unfortunately far too incompatible for that similarity to be any other use than an interesting fact. The other interesting thing is that an attempt has been made to get Arcanum's source code released, but it was a failed attempt. Not as if these things were very surprising to me, but the date on that post has made me wonder if _now_ wouldn't be a bad time to try and get the source published.
Anyways, I've been wondering whether anyone here would know if the engine might be released, perhaps with sufficient spamming force being applied. And where exactly that force should be applied. After all, the engine is quite old by now, not 3D and as an engine, (flame shield up) it never was too good anyway, making rather useless by today's standards, for new products anyway.
The benefits of getting that done are quite obvious, modding-wise, at the very least getting a clear spec of file formats instead of having to reverse engineer everything and hope to have guessed it right. I realize of course that by now most of that has already been worked out, but there sure are parts of the game that could use a bit of tinkering. The other end of the benefit scale would be what happened to Civ:Call to Power 2, that had its source code _fixed_ by the community, including stupid AI and whatever. Actually getting Arcanum polished in such way might help, eventually, getting Arcanum 2 to be made, at the very least based on how many people bothered to get the upgraded version and liked it. Don't mean to be getting ahead of myself or playing with anyone's hopes, since the matter a sequel is at least a disputable one.
I don't really expect this to happen, the source being released, but i suppose it stands a chance of success, since it has happened before with other games that were popular enough and had sufficiently big and active communities.

 

Well, one could take the reverse engineering idea a bit further and write a new engine that could use the arcanum datafiles, or more importantly the maps and the art. Or write some code to input the data into an existing freeware engine, such as Ogre3D or rhe unreal engine. Then there's the input and the mechanics and so i don't think that will ever happen that way around. Take Doom as a example, after the doom engine was released, people started playing with it, and now we have jDoom, based on the original engine (well, actually on Hexen's engine), made in full 3D with community supplied textures, models etc. Of course the fanbase is much bigger and doom modding was pretty much epic in proportions, but then again jDoom wasen't an effort of many people at first. The point is that it's more likely that anyone would rewrite a fun game to make it more fun rather than write another one like it just better.