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Personally, a lot of games suck. Warcraft really was good, but it's old and other games have copied it's idea so many times I can't even bare to play them. I bought Civ:CTP from Loki, and I played it for a few days. But I probably won't buy Quake 3. I bought Q3 for Windows, and honestly, I played for 10 minutes and it's boring. TeamFortress was what made Quake1 so great, and that it was free. Deathmatch is just dumb.

I would rather see some GPL games come straight from the linux community for linux. I have caught a glimpse of Golgotha on http://www.golgotha.org/ but I couldn't tell what they were really up to. =) The real question is: "Can you make a game GPL and it be successful like linux, or will the same idiots that post asinine things about natalie portman spend their worthless lives exploiting those games with things like the modified Quake1 clients?"

And for those of you who post the most useless posts here, you will get a standing ovation someday. Unfortunately for you, it will be at your funeral.

I'll add http://www.golgotha.org/, which isn't as dead as it looks, and will toot my own horn in a subdued manner *toot*
Return Of The Son Of Spacewar (ROTSOS) is my codename for a collection of GPLed sample programs that do terrain generation, with some very impressive possibilities. There is a lot of information on what the algorithms/hacks are and why, and more to come, and GPLed code (think of it as pseudocode, it's 'REALbasic' Mac code) for everything, and there are pictures and movies there too. I made a special effort to make MPEG video despite not being able to afford the real tools (ASTARTE Mpack) to do it- anyone who was able to view the Phantom Menace trailers will be able to see longer movies in Sorenson Quicktime format. There are pictures illustrating the concept behind the terrain generation, and plots of the distribution of the universe generation algorithms.
Who else is working on stuff that can be used for GPLed games? Come on, go public, the time is now! The more we can use good bits of each other's ideas, the better the whole field will be, without too much effort on any one developer's part. For instance, it's dead trivial to take the object placement variation on my terrain-gen code and use it to produce a consistent, godawfulhuge 2D map- and you could easily scale down the large dataset I use to produce a fairly large map from a very small datafile. You'd be basing it on tiles and getting specific index numbers for the tiles from the big virtual map- and would set up the distribution so that the result emerged with a style you liked. In some circumstances this could produce a map too large for any person to explore, so you might have a Warcraft-like thing in which network players would explore the world and discover neat clearings or forests or juxtapositions of natural resources and features like rivers or lakes- potential map situations that you the designer did not specifically put there, but which were emergent from the algorithms.
Put stuff out there! Mix and match :)

• Dore (Dynamic Object Rendering Environment) that was released as public domain software long before Open Source, and near the beginning of the explosion of 3D on PC. Vijay Sarathy said in the release notice (18 Jan 1995): As many of you might have heard Kubota Graphics Corporation will, for all practical purposes, cease engineering operations on February 1, 1995. For the lack of much to do here at Kubota for the past 6 months, except for putting out maintenance releases (ho-hum), we thought that it might be fun to put Dore' out on to the public domain. So we have cleaned it up a little bit, ported and made sure that it works on Linux, FreeBSD and NT. Today, we at Kubota Graphics are proud to announce Public Domain Dore' (Dore 6.0). We certainly hope that it will be the next big graphics API ;-) Enjoy! .
  But it doesn't seemed to be that successful (or is it ?), despite good documentation :-(
• Golgotha, recently featured on /. with the support site Golgotha For Ever, doesn't seem to make giant leaps ; of course it is well alive, but there weren't much code changes in the last 6 months.

Maybe when big projects become open source, should be splitted in small parts, so that people begin to understand, and make the reassembly themselves ?

Of course there are successful examples (XFree86 from X11 source, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD from BSD 4.4 (or 4.3??)), but this seems to be for essential software (if one had to pay again for Netscape browsers, Mozilla would become essential...).

We're looking for artists, musicians, coders!
Check us out at www.golgotha.org

...that was a very inspiring speech you just gave, but I don't see how it is relevant to the very specific critique of the license that Bruce made.

This isn't about politics (BP was only one of THREE people to sign the document); it is about protecting the investment that programmers who spend their "free" time (time is never free) on these projects are not left high and dry when a company like I.B.M. or Apple decides that there is some remote possiblity for an IP suit -- so they must destroy all copies of the code they have worked on and relinquish their hard work to Apple/I.B.M. so they can continue to use it in their commercial products.

Pretty simple to me. It is the same reason that Golgotha Forever switched to the more-restrictive GPL after Crack.com released their code under the restriction-free GPL. I don't want some game company (maybe a competitor to the company that I work for in my day job) taking my freely-contributed code and using it against me -- AND keeping it secret/proprietary!

shane

Golgotha.org

It was on /. yesterday (or the day before).