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.'"

Interested in seeing where this goes

[Limburgher]

I was surprised when I heard about this. I'll definitely be following it closely.

Open source at its worst

[macraig]

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)?

Is this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nexuiz is built on Darkplaces, which is built on GPL'd Quake1 engine. Are they allowed to do this, considering it's based on a GPL code that isn't their own?

Re:Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to be safe, don't copyright your code, otherwise you'll have to deal with pains of asses in the future when they steal your code.

Copyright steps on it's own foot so often it's not even funny, do you realize what extremists authors have become?

Do yourself a favor and release everything to the public domain rather than support dirty diseased licensing models.

What's the difference between sanity and the parent poster? Trolldom.

Re:What's really happening here?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Without John Carmack and LordHavoc (Darkplaces engine developer) giving permission, they're in a huge mess.

LordHavoc is porting the Darkspaces engine to the PS3. I'm pretty sure that's more than enough sign that he's given permission.

Re:What's really happening here?

[h4rr4r]

So all Quake code and community contributions have been removed?

Re:What's really happening here?

[Fallen Kell]

That is a good question, however, I would assume that it would be if the project itself is operating under the GPL, at least in the case of patches/changes to existing source code files. Since the only way for the user to have legal access to the source code to make the changes would require that person to agree to the GPL and this release their changes under the GPL, the "default" release for any said patch/change would thus be GPL, for anything else would mean they were in violation to even create the patch/change, as there was no non-GPL version for them to gain access to the source code before this change occurred.

Re:You must have an different definition of freedo

[Bryan3000000]

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.

Re:Reading is good...

[harlows_monkeys]

Other stories about this have stated that contributors to the engine had to assign copyright, in which case there might not be a problem.

Most of the files in the current head of their Subversion repository have an Id Software copyright notice. The company doing the PS3 game has a license from Id, so appears to have their bases covered on that front.