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TheEnginesOfCreation / EntityPlus

EntityPlus is a mod that offers a true single player experience in the Quake III Arena videogame.
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Could you change the license to GPL? #176

Open LavenderMoon opened 8 years ago

LavenderMoon commented 8 years ago

Is there anything preventing a move to the GPL license used by the Quake 3 source release?

TheEnginesOfCreation commented 8 years ago

Hi, My knowledge about various license agreements is very limited, so I can't answer your question with a definite "yes" or "no". The Quake 3 mod source code comes with the "QIIIA Game Source License.doc" file which describes a licensing format applicable to the game source code. This license explicitly forbids commercial use, while GPL does not forbid that as far as I know. So based on that I'd be leaning towards the "no, it cannot be done" but it could very well be that I am misinterpreting things.

Having said that though, I looked up the license for the full Quake 3 engine release, and it appears this was released under the GPL license. This release does include the same game code as EntityPlus was based on, so I'm not sure if that overrules the license included with the game code package (which was released before id Software released the full game code).

I have no problem with changing it to GPL if that's allowed. If the QIIIA game code license prohibits you from forking EntityPlus for some reason, then I'll look into replacing the .doc file with the GNU GPL license text. I doubt id Software has a problem with that either.

LavenderMoon commented 8 years ago

I'm using @zturtleman's Spearmint as a base for my mod, which is under the GPLv3+. My understanding (I am not a lawyer) is that all you would need to do to transition this codebase from the QIIIA Game Code License to the GPLv2+ License is get all contributors to this codebase to agree to relicense their code to a compatible license (as id Software has released the same code you used as a base under the GPLv2+ License, they have already consented to allowing you to use that code under the GPLv2+ License).

leilei- commented 8 years ago

Legally, I would think it would require an excruciating effort to rebase the whole mod on top of the GPL cgame/game/ui code which has some changes since the SDK release (like no punkbuster IIRC)

And that aforementioned author consent thing is a showstopper as well, and the possibility of use of outside code snippets from dead old tutorials/webpages that may / may not have an infraction risk. Maybe.

For similar reasons I can't use The Dark Conjunction's code either so i'm flying blind with my own currently non-working monster/sp/coop implementation in the GPL.

LavenderMoon commented 8 years ago

Geez, I didn't take into consideration that they would have left Punkbuster in the original Q3A Code License release. That certainly throws a wrench into the works.

TheEnginesOfCreation commented 8 years ago

I actually sent a message to id Software moments ago to ask them about their stance on this. If they give the go ahead to change to GPL, then I think I'll be able to contact the other people that have made submissions to the code to ask them for their explicit approval. We could work something out then.

id Software is still the big "if" at this moment though. I'm curious what they're gonna say (if anything at all).

TheEnginesOfCreation commented 8 years ago

No answer though... :(

zturtleman commented 8 years ago

The only code changes are comments, revision control system IDs, and adding the idppc_altivec define. It's worth noting that Q3 GPL does not include the Team Arena ui/*.menu files and some build system files however. q3a_1.32-sdk_vs_1.32b-gpl.diff

leilei- commented 8 years ago

That's because .menu files are considered copyrighted pak0 content (like shaders and bot personality) and is not essential source code itself.

(and frankly ta's menu is a mess lol, i'm happy to not have a choice to use them.)

Zebrazilla commented 8 years ago

To me it would seem like there is no problem but would love to know the outcome of this - subscribing.

LavenderMoon commented 8 years ago

@TheEnginesOfCreation, could you contact the other contributors and ask them for permission?

TheEnginesOfCreation commented 8 years ago

I sent email messages to the contributers, but in two cases I didn't have email addresses, only user profiles on the Quake3World forums. I sent them a message on there but last-visit dates were 2012 or 2013 or so, so I don't really expect an answer there.