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Nexuiz Founder Licenses It For Non-GPL Use
King InuYasha writes "Nexuiz founder Lee Vermuelen, along with several other core developers, have licensed the Nexuiz name, Nexuiz.com domain, and DarkPlaces engine to Illfonic in a deal to get Nexuiz on consoles. However, the kink is that the engine has been licensed for non-GPL usage. That is, Illfonic has no intention of contributing their code back to the main GPL Nexuiz project. As a result, Nexuiz has been forked into a new project called Xonotic. While the main Nexuiz site doesn't mention that Illfonic has no intention of contributing back, the Xonotic project FAQ explains what's going on. Additionally, the Xonotic project states that Illfonic 'may be in violation of the GPL as most contributors to the Nexuiz codebase have not relicensed their work for inclusion in a closed-source project.'"
The people who contributed their code to Nexuiz under a Freedom license have every right to be pissed if their code is then sold off against their wishes. If the Nexuiz developers want to do so then stop stealing and re-write what isn't yours. The GPL isn't a charity to be exploited - it is a philosophy that says cooperation enriches everyone. If you don't agree with GPL code: DON'T USE IT and write your freaking own. Leaches.
Shh.
As far as I know (IANAL, IAAAC) the legality of this depends largely on one thing: did the code contributors reassign their copyrights to Nexuiz / the code maintainer, or did they retain it?
Without John Carmack and LordHavoc (Darkplaces engine developer) giving permission, they're in a huge mess. I wonder if they are using anything slurped up from other Quake engine projects? Even if the submitter of the code signed off, doesn't matter if they aren't the original author.
Relicensing your code is fine, doing it to others... Well, people get in trouble with that with stolen commercial code as well as GPL. It's dishonest, no matter who it's done to, if it's not done with permission (either direct from all authors or through the terms of the license), they're opening themselves for a world of hurt. And destroying their reputation, as well.
If the only thing that is truly being closed up is the interpreted gamecode and they are developing new artwork, there's nothing to see here...
Google answers:
Nexuiz is a first-person shooter which started as a Quake modification in the summer of 2001
Nope, id is happy to provide commercial licenses to replace the GPL in their open source offerings: http://www.idsoftware.com/business/idtech3/
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
This demonstrates an abuse of open source philosophy. It's an example of deliberately starting an open source project with no intention of keeping it open source: the intention is to milk the unpaid participation of others until the project reaches a certain critical mass - profitability - and then cordon it off. So here we have an open source project that isn't really, to go hand in hand with a "green revolution" that isn't really (because it's all just marketing)?
Especially the part where it says they are relicensing code contributions without the consent of the contributors.
cat
And there you have it folks, tyranny is freedom! Without the freedom to establish tyranny, nobody is free.
(I know, I know - don't feed the BSD trolling)
As a person who follows gaming pretty closely, I have no idea what this is or why anyone should care.
It underscores the risk of what happens when you trust random people over the internet to have your best interest at hand. It's a lesson hard learned, never forgot.
They did not create all of this code. Darkplaces is a Quake1 derivative. They also took community contributions of code. Unless copyright was signed over they cannot keep that code.
Doesn't Nexuiz have code from Quake 3 when it was open sourced? Wouldn't that mean that if they close sourced the engine, id could sue them?
Id Software offers both free and non-free licensing terms for Id Tech 3. It could be the case that the non-free version of Nexuiz uses the non-free version of id Tech 3.
If you wanted true freedom you shouldn't've used code licensed under the GPL. The GPL's interpretation of "freedom" is freedom for EVERYONE, not just for YOU. So while you have free use of the code in question, everyone else has free use of any changes you may make to it. The idea is that if we leave it up to peoples' good wills to ensure freedom, we'll all live in slavery, so we'll legally force everyone to let everyone else be free. Seems to be working out OK.
Ah, no it isn't. It's more like there is a group of people giving away popcorn because they believe it's important to give it away. Then a few people in the group make an arbitrary decision to start charging for the popcorn without the entire group's agreement.
If it had been a single developer who created the project and was the only one who had written any code then your analogy would be correct. It's not what has happened though.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms. Anyone is free to do what the GPL allows for the GPL'd licensed source but for the non-GPL'd you follow the proprietary license.
Only for the code you own yourself. If others contributed, you have no right to relicense that part of the code - you need their agreement that you can do that.
There are a lot of quake game engines, most of then have a single person behind. Behind DarkPlaces is Lord Havoc.
We normally see the other route, ... a closed source game (Quake engine from Quake) open source his engine. A open source game is created from a closed source game (FreeCiv from Civ ). This route is "new", a open source game spawns a closed source game.
There has ben some discussions on the forums, but It has been mostly about the use of the name. Is like how Firefox started as Phoenix so got renamed to Firebird... (only to be renamed again to Firefox!). But this time Illfonic let the community continue using the name.. . Of course, some people really dislike the very idea :-/. To this date, not contributor has claimed steal code or something like that.
Vermeulen is a hardworking individual, and has push this game (nexuiz) for more than 9 years now (And If you have work on a open source project, you know how hard is to get people moving forward). I have only good things to say about Lord Havoc and the very high quality of his code. He control all the code of DarkPlaces to be of the best quality possible, this mean rewriting things to get to his standard of quality. Is this rewriting all code that probably has made possible to closed-source the engine.
HOW?
1) You get the original source code from the Id Software FTP, and a license for it (probably legacy, since is not for sale now).
2) You put all that code in the CVS. This code is the original, and you have a license for it.
3) Lord Havoc commit all his code changes to this CVS. Since he own his own changes (he is the author of these changes) he can do it.
4) The resulting code is both authored by Id Software and Lord Havoc.
5) This code is licensed by Lord Havoc to Illphonic (Illphonic already have a license from Id Software).
6) If theres some code from other authors, Illphonic acquire rights from these authors.
7) TADA!... you have a closed source engine you can use to create games for XBox 360 and Playstation 3 (I suppose lots of changes are needed to achieve this compatibility, but you have the basics of the engine).
The authors of a work can "relicense" his work. This why Id Software can release the quake source engine as gpl AND a different license. Lord Havoc is the same as Id Software, so is doing the exact same thing, releasing his work on a different license.
-Woof woof woof!
Then don't use it. Anywhere. The Freedom to rip it off is not included. It's is - as someone else mentioned - Freedom for EVERYONE not Freedom for YOU.
Shh.
One different than the one I do. Because your freedom seems to come with restrictions.
Freedom always comes with restrictions if it is just and equal, because your freedom to do something often implies a restriction or cost for me. The GPL ensures that all the contributors have a common set of freedoms, but those translate into restrictions as well.
The Apache and BSD licenses ensure that all the contributors have a different set of freedoms, and a different set of limitations placed on them.
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms.
Sure. IF they were the producers.
But what if I gave YOU butter for free, but under a license (i.e. the GPL) which improves your popcorn. And you in turn gave it away for free along with the popcorn you produced. (which is allowed).
Then you decide to start charging 10 cents for the popcorn, and are still including my butter. That's not ok. It violates my license.
You are allowed to change the license and re-license the stuff YOU produce, but in this case, and in most oss projects, the individual contributors retain copyright, and as a result the project 'founder' cannot simply relicense it, because he only owns copyright on his actual code. He can change its terms, but not the terms of contributed code. Separating the two is not easy, and the end result may not be desirable... like popcorn without butter.
No, that's why they also got a license to the Quake1 engine:
Illfonic has obtained the rights to the Nexuiz's engine code, along with a license for the Quake1 engine. The engine has been licensed as non-GPL for Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, these are very closed platforms and the game had no chance of reaching them under GPL.
From here.
You have less freedom under the GPL to do what you want with code. And you gain the ability to tell others what they can do with the code under the GPL.
Neither of these is a proper subset of the other, so it's difficult to say you have "less freedom than under the GPL".
My point was the author of the comment called the GPL license a Freedom (italics theirs) and it is not a license of freedom, like all licenses, it's a license of restrictions.
The GPL is only a freedom license when compared to closed-source license. Compared to other, freer licenses, it's really concerned about creating a commons than it is about freedom.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I never understand this argument. People always talk of freedom without personal pronouns, which makes the argument moot. There's no such thing as 'freedom', there's only my, your, our freedom. The BSD protects someones freedom pretty damn totally, and the GPL protects everyones freedom at the cost of basically not allowing you to distribute binaries without source. Trying to compare these in 'freedomness' is moronic: it's literally comparing apples and oranges.
Now I don't know if 'freedom' is shorthand for either of these, but if it's a measure of importance (which is more important, my or our freedom) I'd argue our freedom is more important (thus, the GPL). Just like how one mans ability to rule himself (monarchy) is less important than our ability to rule ourselves (democracy), even if it is at a small cost (I actually can do less than a king).
Mhm? There's an update up on the Nexuiz news page: "There appears to still be some confusion over this change. I would like to make more things clear: *Illfonic has obtained the rights to the Nexuiz's engine code, along with a license for the Quake1 engine. The engine has been licensed as non-GPL for Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, these are very closed platforms and the game had no chance of reaching them under GPL. *The Nexuiz's engine's prime developer (LordHavoc) is currently working on the Illfonic console version. The Nexuiz codebase will benefit from Illfonic's additions *IllFonic actively promotes the GPL Nexuiz for all operating systems."
Because your freedom seems to come with restrictions.
Tell me about this land that you come from.
It would appear to be a place without laws.
Oh. Do you not believe you are free unless you have the right to keep slaves, then?
Bruce Perens.
I only want to point out that in a recent analysis of the DarkPlaces engine source, 1.29% of lines that are not license headers or blank lines, have never been modified.
Put another way, the engine is no more than 2% Quake1 codebase, and a vast majority of the code was written by me, especially the platform independent core portions.
Tracking down contributors when there is one primary author of the entire codebase, who knows almost every line of it by memory, is not as hard as it sounds.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." - James Klass
Would that be GPL popcorn or the re-licensed popcorn?
(See above conversation thread if this zips by you.)
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
You are confusing freedom and sovereignty, as no doubt are others in this discussion. Your sovereignty is reduced if any action is not available to you. Sovereignty is a one-to-many relationship, freedom is maximized to the extent that all persons are free and that persons are not allowed to act as sovereigns over the rest. Thus, law providing fairness, for example the sharing implemented in the GPL, both increases freedom and limits a sovereign.
Bruce Perens.
We can argue about degrees of freeness, but the fact that there were debates about the use of drivers (wireless I think), from BSD into Linux, I think it is fair to say there are restrictions implied in BSD too.
Note, I think it is 100% fair to say that BSD is more free for the recipient than GPL.
Right, BSD licensing does not give the freedom to license BSD code under a different license just because you make modifications to it. No license allows that, so you can't really call it a restriction. You can license your own modifications under any license you like however, unlike the GPL.
http://astutehosting.com/
GPL exists to encourage code re-use, so the obvious, and unfortunate, conclusion of this line of thought involves one cup and 2 girls.
Yeah, the freedom to deny others' freedom. That's great. I really, really like a great deal of BSD licensed projects. I really, really hope there is always someone willing to distribute the source in addition to however else they may distribute it, so that others can enjoy the same freedom to stand on the work of others. But it's not guaranteed in any way. Some projects are a single person's decision away from becoming effectively non-free because nobody has the responsibility to keep them free, even if they use, distribute, and profit from them extensively.
You are confusing freedom and sovereignty, as no doubt are others in this discussion.
Wait a minute. I thought this was an anarcho-syndicalist commune!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
But Mozilla "owns" the source code. They request contributions of code be signed over to them to be in the official tree... that way they can legally prove they "own" every line, and can adjust the license at will. Each contributor gets the choice UP FRONT to agree or not to sign off to Mozilla.
This is the same problem the Linux Kernel has moving from GPL2 to GPL3. Linus specifically didn't include an "or later version" clause, and some contributors are even DEAD. There's no way to change the license... Unless this game had code assignment too, I can't see how they can do this.