DarkPlaces Dev Forest Hale Corrects Nexuiz GPL Stance 131
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.'"
CLEAN ROOM re-implemented? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sad (Score:1, Insightful)
Money that could have been used to do proper marketing, QA, etc for the game is now wasted on reimplementing it from scratch.
Sad panda :(
Re:GPL freaks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:the problem are Xbox and Sony (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [theesa.com]
Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just going to be another uninspired, derivative, run-of-the-mill arena shooter you played to death 10 years ago.
Re:GPL freaks (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Digital Downloads and things (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:CLEAN ROOM re-implemented? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what does the GPL actually say, and how does that effect the issue of creating a derivative work?
Re:"all" they share is the name... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?