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Id engines —as well as many other projects— were dual licensed, GPL or Proprietary. If you wanted to make a game with one, it either had to be GPL too, or you p

Id engines —as well as many other projects— were dual licensed, GPL or Proprietary. If you wanted to make a game with one, it either had to be GPL too, or you paid for a traditional licence. This got Id paid and let modders and the open source gaming community go wild. What's the downside? Carmack's argument about perception, but his view is really about having had more people use his software. I think he's wrong. Brave thing for any SWE to claim but Id wouldn't have open sourced a second engine if the first was freely taken by a dozen companies and sold in competition with for game sales, giving no source improvements back. And no, GPL advocates say it protects users of downstream projects. Software freedom is a huge topic, but the user is the focus. The arrangement Id had protected them too. Carmack's take is just odd.

jbluepolarbear 5y ago
I know a lot of game developers that have never messed with Id tech because of the license, so what Carmack is saying makes sense. Yes I’ve read the Id tech code that’s been released but I’ve never thought for one second to use the code because of the license.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  What you're both saying is there is licensing ignorance. People read "open source" ignore the small print, get in trouble. GPL isn't special there, EULAs and enterprise software licenses are horrible, but I can understand the broader point that GPL makes you think, and thinking hurts. The point I maintain is, in Id's position at the time, a MIT/BSD license would have just cost them their engine business. Their code would have been everywhere, but they'd lose the business case for future open sourcing. The net amount of usage would be way down on what we have today.
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    I’ve been in software a long time and I’ve had to navigate the gpl and it derivatives the entire time. I primarily work in games and I’ve run into a lot of issues with gpl along my career. For most of my career lawyers dictate what is and isn’t acceptable for software licenses and gpl is always the biggest issue. Which gpl license? Is there a single license holder? I feel the gpl was enacted with good intentions, but I feel the wrong people enacted it. Too radical in many ways, too restrictive, and so aggressively enforced that it at least makes using gpl libraries a hard decision. I think that open source projects, that aren’t gpl, have proved that you can build software and still money from it. Godot, React, Chromium, and Node to name a few. Active development is worth much more than the actual code and encouraging your users to contribute back without the cost of giving away their product has allowed these and similar projects to grow. I think ID would have had a similar experience had they gone with a different license.
wernsey 5y ago
> Id wouldn't have open sourced a second engine if the first was freely taken by a dozen companies and sold in competition with for game sales, giving no source improvements back. I don't agree with this statement, because they used to open source their engines a generation behind their current one. They released the Doom source when Quake was state of the art, so I doubt having another company release a Doom clone in the era of Quake would've put them at a significant disadvantage. But it is a moot point anyway. That hypothetical other company could've taken the GPL engine and created a game that competed with their games. All that would've been required of them is to make their modified source code available (assuming they even modified the source - their new game might as well have been the stock QUAKE.EXE with a proprietary .PAK and it would've been totally acceptable). But in order to compete against them that game would've actually had to be good: It would have to have good graphics assets created from scratch along with good gameplay. Not to mention strong marketing given the strength of the Id brand. What I'm saying is that I don't think the GPL protected Id from their competition from using their open-sourced code against them.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  Interesting points but it's hard to say for certain without knowing what the individual license terms are. Games continue to sell long after release, and many were released close to the open sourcing dates. Would Id have lost out on long-tail income if the devs could have switched to (eg) MIT terms? And with a MIT IdTech2 engine, would any of their IdTech3 customers layered on their own improvements to the older engine? It's not like an engine is an drop-in solution. You still have to work it, and IdTech3 is after all just Id's improvements. Somebody could have taken the earlier engineering and run with it, just as open source efforts did, but into their own closed-source product. WRT competition, I don't disagree on the point about the game's not being solely about the engine, but the era of gaming we're talking about did very much rely on novel technology. I think changes like those done by Infinity Ward may have changed the engine marketplace pretty disruptively in the early 2000s' flood of WW2 games, if they'd had to release them. GPL protected Id's take (CoD has an extremely long tail), as well as letting IW keep all their changes theirs.
  - 5y ago

jbluepolarbear 5y ago

I know a lot of game developers that have never messed with Id tech because of the license, so what Carmack is saying makes sense. Yes I’ve read the Id tech code that’s been released but I’ve never thought for one second to use the code because of the license.

oliwarner 5y ago
What you're both saying is there is licensing ignorance. People read "open source" ignore the small print, get in trouble. GPL isn't special there, EULAs and enterprise software licenses are horrible, but I can understand the broader point that GPL makes you think, and thinking hurts. The point I maintain is, in Id's position at the time, a MIT/BSD license would have just cost them their engine business. Their code would have been everywhere, but they'd lose the business case for future open sourcing. The net amount of usage would be way down on what we have today.
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  I’ve been in software a long time and I’ve had to navigate the gpl and it derivatives the entire time. I primarily work in games and I’ve run into a lot of issues with gpl along my career. For most of my career lawyers dictate what is and isn’t acceptable for software licenses and gpl is always the biggest issue. Which gpl license? Is there a single license holder? I feel the gpl was enacted with good intentions, but I feel the wrong people enacted it. Too radical in many ways, too restrictive, and so aggressively enforced that it at least makes using gpl libraries a hard decision. I think that open source projects, that aren’t gpl, have proved that you can build software and still money from it. Godot, React, Chromium, and Node to name a few. Active development is worth much more than the actual code and encouraging your users to contribute back without the cost of giving away their product has allowed these and similar projects to grow. I think ID would have had a similar experience had they gone with a different license.

wernsey 5y ago

> Id wouldn't have open sourced a second engine if the first was freely taken by a dozen companies and sold in competition with for game sales, giving no source improvements back. I don't agree with this statement, because they used to open source their engines a generation behind their current one. They released the Doom source when Quake was state of the art, so I doubt having another company release a Doom clone in the era of Quake would've put them at a significant disadvantage. But it is a moot point anyway. That hypothetical other company could've taken the GPL engine and created a game that competed with their games. All that would've been required of them is to make their modified source code available (assuming they even modified the source - their new game might as well have been the stock QUAKE.EXE with a proprietary .PAK and it would've been totally acceptable). But in order to compete against them that game would've actually had to be good: It would have to have good graphics assets created from scratch along with good gameplay. Not to mention strong marketing given the strength of the Id brand. What I'm saying is that I don't think the GPL protected Id from their competition from using their open-sourced code against them.

oliwarner 5y ago
Interesting points but it's hard to say for certain without knowing what the individual license terms are. Games continue to sell long after release, and many were released close to the open sourcing dates. Would Id have lost out on long-tail income if the devs could have switched to (eg) MIT terms? And with a MIT IdTech2 engine, would any of their IdTech3 customers layered on their own improvements to the older engine? It's not like an engine is an drop-in solution. You still have to work it, and IdTech3 is after all just Id's improvements. Somebody could have taken the earlier engineering and run with it, just as open source efforts did, but into their own closed-source product. WRT competition, I don't disagree on the point about the game's not being solely about the engine, but the era of gaming we're talking about did very much rely on novel technology. I think changes like those done by Infinity Ward may have changed the engine marketplace pretty disruptively in the early 2000s' flood of WW2 games, if they'd had to release them. GPL protected Id's take (CoD has an extremely long tail), as well as letting IW keep all their changes theirs.
- 5y ago