I would assume that it has something to do with liscensing, and them not being owned/created by Mike or Rez.

I prefer to think of it as malicious, with Rez and Mike sitting in a dark room somewhere, stroking their collective cat, and laughing menacingly in unison.

Or it could be to reduce the check out size for people? Not sure how much the zipping compresses the 3rd Party stuff though.

James

3rdParty.zip is not apart of the repository because it almost never changes. We don't need to track history and we don't want to incurr the cost of adding it in there. We have a limited amount of space on google code.

-Rez