planned as in announced in the post above from golgot, yes. however keep in mind that this is some time into the future and much can happen until then. e.g. braben could be no longer in the company at that time, or they might decide to sell the thing to a third company to continue maintenance, or sell the whole company with all of their franchises.
once released there are other challenges, i expect the code to be very dependent on specific technologies specially server-side, and adaptation to different/new infrastructure might be some work. no doubt doable if enough hands scramble.
another option, which you can resort to right now, is just keep a copy of the client and reverse engineer the server(s). replicating full functionality would be quite a bit of work but you don't really need to, you just would need to replicate what you actually want to work. you could even change many aspects of the game to your preferences. nb: this would be illegal to publish (and to do at all even privately at home in some countries) but it would allow you to play solo.
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