Near Death Studios announced that the company would be ceasing operations on January 6, 2010, after which "Meridian 59" would continue running, but not as a commercial concern of Near Death Studios. In February 2010, "Meridian 59" was turned over to the original technical developers, Andrew and Chris Kirmse. On September 15, 2012, the team released the game to the public as freeware and most of the source code under the GPLv2 license. For a while, "Meridian 59" had an international presence, with servers operating in Germany, run by the company MDO (active 2002-2009), and Russia, in addition to a "Sacred Haven" (non-PvP) server operated by Skotos. These are no longer operational.