4 ms·

> 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

> 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.
- wernsey 5y ago
  So what you're saying is that IW had a commercial license for IdTech3 and made several proprietary changes to it and Id kept getting royalties. I'm not privy to the details of Id's licensing contracts, but I imagine that they priced their licenses in such a way that licensing was more attractive than creating your own engine. If IdTech2 was available under a BSD/MIT license then IW could've just taken that, improved it, kept their changes to themselves and not pay Id any royalties. I see your point, but I'm still inclined to think that it wouldn't have made much of a difference to Id's engine licensing business at the time. In our hypothetical situation where IdTech2 was available under MIT/BSD then IW would either be stuck with inferior graphics or would've had to spend significant resources to get it up to the standard of IdTech3 (which also comes with the business risk of whether you'll be able to pull it off and how long it would take). They would also have to rely on themselves to get support, rather than Id. I think executives would in the end just see licensing IdTech3 as the cheaper and less risky option. I think this is what Carmack's tweet is about: At the time his business partners thought that the GPL license would protect their business and insisted upon it, but now with the benefit of hindsight he recons that the code would've had a greater impact if it was made available under a more permissive license.

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.

wernsey 5y ago
So what you're saying is that IW had a commercial license for IdTech3 and made several proprietary changes to it and Id kept getting royalties. I'm not privy to the details of Id's licensing contracts, but I imagine that they priced their licenses in such a way that licensing was more attractive than creating your own engine. If IdTech2 was available under a BSD/MIT license then IW could've just taken that, improved it, kept their changes to themselves and not pay Id any royalties. I see your point, but I'm still inclined to think that it wouldn't have made much of a difference to Id's engine licensing business at the time. In our hypothetical situation where IdTech2 was available under MIT/BSD then IW would either be stuck with inferior graphics or would've had to spend significant resources to get it up to the standard of IdTech3 (which also comes with the business risk of whether you'll be able to pull it off and how long it would take). They would also have to rely on themselves to get support, rather than Id. I think executives would in the end just see licensing IdTech3 as the cheaper and less risky option. I think this is what Carmack's tweet is about: At the time his business partners thought that the GPL license would protect their business and insisted upon it, but now with the benefit of hindsight he recons that the code would've had a greater impact if it was made available under a more permissive license.