Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?
- From: cc <cc riseup.net>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:47:41 +0000
Hi
On Mon 26-Jan-2004 at 08:23:19AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Per I. Mathisen
wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Niall Douglas wrote:
commercial interests are simply not interested in
sinking a lot of cash into GPL development.
To the contrary, the GPL is good for companies that want
to contribute, since the GPL protects them from
competitors that may use it to gain a leg up on the
contributor. Troll Tech and ID Software are examples of
companies that do this.
I don't know much about Troll Tech, but ID Software are a
very good example of this.
ID have a practice of releasing the 3d engine of their
games under the GPL a few months after the latest game is
out. The Doom (1 and 2), Quake 1 and Quake 2 engines are
all now available under the GPL and this has led to people
working on bug fixing and improving these engines (for
example you can get a version of Doom with mouse support
and the ability to jump up onto things, something that
didn't exist in the original).
ID Software don't however release the artwork, models,
textures audio or levels under the GPL, only the 3d
engine. I think that they do this because they can,
because they (Carmack at least) likes free software and
not for any commercial reasons. They want to support the
community of gamers who do modifications to their games,
who create new levels and total conversions.
They also know that the other games companies are not
going to use a GPLed version of a ID engine -- they
wouldn't want to let people have the source code. Half
Life / Counterstrike came out based on a modified Quake 1
engine after the Quake 1 source had been released (as far
as I can remember).
I'm sure that when the legal discussions took place at ID
about releasing the engines under the GPL they were very
much aware that a BSD/Apache style license would enable
other companies to produce binary-only games using their
engine and they didn't want this -- much of their money
comes from selling their 3d engine to other compaines.
Quake 3 did have a Linux version that you could
buy and it lost them a load of money, Doom 3 will have a
Linux binary but don't expect this to be mentioned on the
shrink wrapped version -- it was the cost of support for
the Linux Quake 3 that determined that for the moment
Linux versions have to come without support.
As I have mentioned before, all evidence shows that
far more commercial cash is poured into BSD/MIT
software development than GPL
The free software community and the bulk of free
software was not built by commercial cash. What
evidence, by the way?
Yes are there any stats on this anywhere?
It is interesting to note that big commercial software
projects such as StarOffice and Mozilla, which were
originally written as non-free software, were put under
the GPL by large capitalist organisations, rather than a
BSD/Apache style license.
Also another interesting example is wine -- wine was under
a BSD/Apache style license and winex took advantage of
this and started producing a commercial version with
support for DRM for playing windows games in Linux. The
main wine project was so upset about this thay they
changed to using the GPL.
Chris
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