Slashdot Mirror
id Resolves DOSBox/GPL Issue
The British Gaming Blog is reporting that id Software has successfully resolved the minor issue it had with DOSBox, regarding older PC games being sold on Valve's Steam network. "The problem is all fixed up now with the proper licensing text in the game's readme. Developers working hand in hand with smaller application authors is not all that uncommon; SCUMM has worked closely with point and click masters Revolution and LucasArts to improve compatibility with their games, and hopefully this trend will continue so we can experience more old classics in the future."
Id software will suffer long, and the result on their bottom line will be degraded greatly. They might even go out of business, considering the costs the inclusion of the text of the licensing agreement of DosBox in their readme will incur.
Probably the launcher requires Steam or the application itself but Dosbox is untouched.
So it still works when you replace VALVe's DOSbox with the latest DOSbox release?
You still need the levels from the original games, and if you want to play more than the shareware episodes...
I expect DOSBox was already capable of running Quake, and any modifications by Steam are probably just in the configuration file to set its memory, Soundblaster, game image and so on.
But you still need the original game to do this in full legality. This offer is for people who don't already own the games and want to buy it. After that I think they can use any port they want to play them.
You can still use those engine ports with the Steam version. Steam only protects the main executable, not the data WAD files.
Actually, Valve put a wrappper around the DOSBox executable, making it so that it wouldn't run if Steam wasn't present. Underneath that was an unmodified version of DOSBox, but there's still some users on the DOSBox forums claiming that this still constitutes a "modification" to it, and requires that they release the source to it, as well as the program that "links" to it, aka, STEAM.
Of course, since the senior DOSBox staff seems content with this, it doesn't look like this will come to anything more than a bunch of whiners spamming forums 'cause they think they've been "wronged"...
My sig can beat up your sig.
This issue was already resolved when the violation story was posted. This story would have been better served as a Slashback article.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Aye, that it does.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Actually, Steam isn't even doing THAT much; it's protecting the DOSBox executable, which you can easily get a non-DRM'd version of. The game executable is DRM-free...
My sig can beat up your sig.
Actually at least the most recent titles Sega Genesis Collection (PS2/PSP) and Sega Vintage Collection (Xbox 360 Live Arcade) definitely do _not_ use open source emulation. Digital Eclipse (aka Backbone) has proprietary emulation code which is used in many many emulation compilations. Open source emulation code (such as Gens) tends to rely on a patchwork of code from various sources (68000 core, Z80 core, sound chips, and so on) which would make it extremely difficult (or impossible) to properly license it as a package for commercial release.
This really was a no-brainer non-issue from the start. /. article hit the frontpage.
It's obvious that ID are proponents of open software.
The dosbox forums were not half-way as upset as slashdot.
ID-software started fixing this, even before the
Nothing to see here, or for that matter in the previous article, move along.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Here's an exchange from the QuakeCon keynote last Friday:
n _carmack-quakecon-keynote-2007.mp3 (about 1 hour 25 minutes in)
Audience member:
"I wanted to say thank you for open-sourcing the Quake 3 engine, it's made a huge difference to the community. I wanted to ask your opinion about the future of Linux and open source gaming."
John Carmack:
"I do take a great deal of personal pride and satisfaction with what I've been able to do with getting so much of the stuff out. Sometimes I think about it, and while I know it's not something I'm generally considered for, I may be one of the most prolific open source authors considering all the code that I've written over the last 15 years that I've made open source, or have made open source there. I do think it's very valuable. I'm very happy when I see both user gaming community stuff, or research universities, or people doing simulation tests, or bringing up things. Every new piece of hardware ends up having Doom or Quake titles used as an early form of test application. So I'm very happy to have done that. It's certainly going to continue. I mean I won't commit to a date, but the Doom 3 stuff will be open source. We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that."
Source: http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Rage/Movies/joh
:wq
It is much better to light a candle than damn the darkness.
DOSBox
More Twoson than Cupertino
Well aside from the fact that this is what Valve is doing (distributing the source), it is actually not a requirement of the GPL that you distribute the source along with the binaries. Here's the relevent part of the GPL:
So merely offering to send you the source if you ask (not even necessarily through steam, they could require you to mail a request with a small shipping fee and then they mail you a CD with the source on it) would be sufficient. But practically speaking, since compared to the games your downloading the source to dosbox is most likely very small, it's just easier for them to comply by giving you the binaries and source at the same time.
The enemies of Democracy are
Slightly off-topic. Here's a fix I wrote that patches the conf files of DoxBox inside Steam. Sorry for the code, wrote at 1-2 am last night and was a bit under influence. Ignore the silly and/or slow parts. SteamIDDosBoxFix.zip . Fixed are: aspect ratio under 1280x1024 TFT displays, sound stuttering, mouse sensitivity. You can edit dosbox.conf yourself, the fix simply replaces your entries into all .conf files (while keeping their format) it can find under Steam's install dir (which is taken from the registry).
This is probably the dream situation. First, the GPL developers actually recognize that id and steam using their stuff is a good thing. Second, id and steam didn't integrate any of the GPL stuff into their own base.
Take either of those two things away and this situation can quickly approach nightmare levels from a corporate perspective. Eventually, there is going to be a very high profile case where some developer at some company gets caught stealing gpl code after integrating it into their companies product line. It's happening already, just no one has got caught yet.
I'm sure the company will blame the developer. That may be their main line of defence. I wonder if removing the offending code will work, after all, that's what everyone says they'll do if MS ever tries to enforce a patent. I don't think that would work in either case (seriously, if you remove code then you are admitting infringement, maybe not a good strategy).
So far, most of these GPL violations have been minor, not that you'd know it on slashdot.
LESS COFFEE???!
But I'VE ONLY had 12 cups today.