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DarkPlaces Dev Forest Hale Corrects Nexuiz GPL Stance
Time Doctor writes "There has been a lot of information going around about Nexuiz, the GPL, and what the Nexuiz leadership has done. A new interview has gone up with DarkPlaces developer Forest Hale to set things straight. Quoting: 'The original plan was to contact every developer and relicense the Nexuiz 2.5.2 GPL gamecode sources for this title, to ensure authentic gameplay and return some important features to the community for the benefit of everyone. However this gamecode re-licensing attempt did not go well; with the former developers making claims of violations there was no choice but to re-implement the gamecode from scratch on non-GPL sources. As a result there will be no ongoing code contributions back to the community, and the gameplay may differ more than originally planned. This is a very unfortunate outcome but has no significant impact on development. To make this perfectly clear – the game is being reimplemented from scratch; all they share is a name.'"
Because otherwise, you know, derivative work, and a thousand years bad juju.
Given what they just tried to do, and the casual disregard they had for licensing until they got caught in the act, I'd say the burden of proof lies with the re-implementors.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
To be fair those freaks were the contributors who wrote the code under the expectation that the codebase will remain free throughout all revisions. When I intend for my work to be used in ANY project, including closed source ones I mark it PD, not GPL.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What's sad about it? If platform licensing models like Xbox, PS/3, and iPhone were to catch on, you could kiss open source development good-bye. And there is a big risk that the consumer market will drive us into that direction. We need to fight that any way we can.
And if the GPL makes it more costly to do marketing and QA of software for those platforms, I think that's great. That is exactly what the GPL is intended to accomplish.
I've got some bad news for you...
General purpose, programmable machines without gatekeepers are still the primary way people compute at home and at work. We need to keep it that way.
using the term "Free Software" is implying that someone sides with the FSF and GPL over other open source licenses.
No, the term "free software" implies the four freedoms, nothing more, nothing less. There's lots of pubic domain and BSD-ware which is called free software (eg. Chromium, Postgres, BSD itself). If you're trying to draw a line between free software and open source, the line has already been drawn.
You've got to be kidding me. Console games almost completely crush PC games in market share these days, with the only thing keeping PC games afloat being The Sims and WoW. And that's before you include the iPhone as a "console".
See: http://www.theesa.com/newsroom/release_detail.asp?releaseID=44
It's just going to be another uninspired, derivative, run-of-the-mill arena shooter you played to death 10 years ago.
Summation 2
Interesting comment LordHavoc makes about the state of console gaming.
Honestly, attempting to bring a fast-paced shooter like Nexuiz to a console is going to fail and fail miserably - there is a reason "slow-paced" shooters are more popular on consoles - fast-paced shooters require a fast and precise control mechanism (mouse + keyboard), console control mechanisms are neither of these. (Which is why I don't play console-based shooters.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If 20 % of the code could not be relicensed, then that 20 percent has to be re-written from scratch in a clean-room style.
Anything else, and the contributors of that 20% should cry foul.
Remember, if there's one line of proprietary code in the linux kernel, Microsoft can cry foul. Why not expect the same for people in the closed source world?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The PC market is much bigger. The problem here is that is moving to digital, where is invisible to the usual metric systems. Also is "multishape", games like FarmVille get 80 millions. How much million play most console games? on the PC, you have to count webgames, flashgames, casual games, indie games, open source games... not everything shows on a phisic shop, since most are online transactions.
-Woof woof woof!
He can't really say that the original plan was to contact every developer, the deal was made in complete and absolute secret. Not a single developer knew about the Nexuiz deal, not a single notification was sent, most of us knew about it when we saw the the homepage was changed, only providing a small link to "Nexuiz GPL" at the bottom.
In my opinion there is no way to consider that this deal was morally right, there was people who were contributing code on a daily basis for *years*, the least you will expect is to get some sort of notification if someone is about to make money out of your hard work. In other words what they done is just stealing.
And of course they must rewrite the whole Nexuiz codebase now, that's the only way for them to prevent getting sued. Not to mention that after the deal was made public there was no dialog *at all* between Lee Vermeulen (the owner of Nexuiz) and the developers, there was no attempt at all to fix what they done (again, stealing), mostly because you actually need to talk in order to fix things.
That was the very reason because the Xonotic project was born, we as developers just can't trust Alientrap (which is only Lee Vermeulen) anymore.
It's sad that LH now makes it look like thanks to the unreasonable (ex)developers of Nexuiz now there will be no improvements flowing back to GPL Nexuiz. I don't know you but I'm getting used to his bursts of insulting statements.
Isn't this one of the main bones of contention though? The www.nexuiz.com URL no longer takes you to the GPL project it used to, it displays a page about Illfonic's new console game and there's a tiny link in the corner of the page that takes you to the original project page!
Couldn't they have used a different name for what is, essentially, a different game?
Sure, but why? The nexuiz name has brand recognition and so they can use that to help make the console game standout amongst other, similar games.
Which brings up an interesting point on the GPL - while the code is free the name may not be; resulting in an a FOSS project creating a valuable brand that then can be taken private. A rather novel way to get startup funding; I wonder when someone will want to extend the GPL to include the project name and any associated marks?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.