id and Valve May Be Violating GPL

frooge writes "With the recent release of iD's catalog on Steam, it appears DOSBox is being used to run the old DOS games for greater compatibility. According to a post on the Halflife2.net forums, however, this distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license that DOSBox is distributed under, which violates the license. According to the DOSBox developers, they were not notified that it was being used for this release."

Comments

Re:Outdated Article

[cronot]

I can't see how it could be an oversight. The license files are distributed along with the DOSBox binaries / sources, so they should have deliberately deleted the license text files at some point before publishing them.

Re:Does this mean

[mrchaotica]

What part of "except it may or may not be copyleft" did you not understand?

Nice going of the dosbox retards

[imsabbel]

Reading their forum thread about this yesterday, the very first reaction was a developer ranting foam-in-mouth about the evils of corporation and that steam sucks your soul ect.

Come on. Last time i used dosbox (or tried to), it was sch a piece of shit that i didnt find a single game of my old early 90 collection that i could run on my Athlon without crashing/going down to 4fps or something. I wold have never touched this crap again.

The fact that steam uses it now to emulate those titles seems to indicate that its now reliable and fast enough to actually do that. This could boost dosbox popularity by orders of magnitude and really bring the project into the limelight, if developers would actually care. Now the message is: stay away from this stuff, all you get is a nasty slashdot article.