Nexuiz Gets Forked, Turned Into Xonotic

[RobbieAB]

SavageX has quite clearly stated that the Cg renderer has been contributed back to the Darkplaces engine, along with the tightened up memory behaviour. Whether you actually need to modify the engine to play nicely with the joypad I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me to discover you can write a wrapper for the Joypad to make it appear as a regular keyboard/mouse combo to the engine though.

Overall, I'm not sure what other modifications are actually needed in a properly portable code-base, given a capable compiler. IF you are so sure there is a smoking gun, I would suggest you cite references to support it.

[Remco]

I don't have an explicit reference for it, but I hope we can all agree that the Playstation 3 SDK is not GPL compatible. That means a PS3 game can't be released as GPL, and that means all those legal steps I mentioned in my previous post need to have happened. That means they don't have to give any code back.

[RobbieAB]

GPL compatability only matters if they link to it.

So where is the GPL violation if they write a program in the SDK to translate the Joypad input and feed that to the engine as keyboard+mouse input?

On the Cg front, clearly it is legal, as otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to use proprietry openGl drivers from GPL applications. I don't see anything that has to actually violate the GPL.

[Remco]

That sounds fishy to me. But let's suppose the new Nexuiz engine really is released as a GPL program on the PS3. That means they will either ship the machine-readable code on the Bluray, or they will give customers a written offer for 3 years to request the code. Let's see if that happens.

That would be awesome news by the way.

[DeepDayze]

...change Phoronix' Nexuiz benchmarks to 'Xonotic', then have all packages at all distributions switch Nexuiz to Xonotic the firt time there is a release.

I wonder how long it'll take Debian to kick Nexuiz out when they learn that the name is no longer free to use...

Probably not long at all to remove the nexuiz packages and then package the xonotic ones.

[xav1r]

It seems like they bought the Darkplaces engine, too, and they must have removed any code for which the copyright wasn't assigned to the founder. And they managed to get a license from Id. Otherwise I don't see how they can put a GPL engine (Darkplaces was released as GPL) derived from another GPL engine (Quake was released as GPL) on a console (which requires modifications to the engine to run, and those modifications can not be released as GPL).

The way I see it, if they have done all the things necessary to be able to sell this game at all, then they don't even have to contribute any code back, legally.

Wouldnt it have been much less trouble to just make their own 3d engine from scratch? Or get a license from a closed engine? And how did they manage to get a quake 1 license from id, if they dont offer licenses for q1 anymore??

[bridgman]

My understanding was that id did not *offer* (promote, advertise, encourage the licensing of...) the Q1 engine but would still consider licensing it if someone specifically requested.

[RobbieAB]

My understanding was that id did not *offer* (promote, advertise, encourage the licensing of...) the Q1 engine but would still consider licensing it if someone specifically requested.

Meaning they are a corporation who will take money if it's offered to them. No surprises there.

[Irritant]

I'm not sure a fork was the best move(I think they could have been more patient to see if Illfonic finally flinched), but I do wish the community the best of luck.

The entire situation was very poorly handled, and continues to be so by Illfonic. They are just a tiny indie developer with very little track record, so it can be understood they would make such a big mistake in judgement. The more perplexing thing is that they didn't learn from the mistake, and stood steadfast in their position because legally they could.

[Remco]

Forest Hale clears up some things:

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 relicensing attempt did not go well, with the former developers making claims of violations there was no choice but to reimplement 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.

And for those that believed GPL and consoles don't bite each other:

[Can a GPL game engine be used on consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3?]
Not directly, however copyright holders have the right to provide other licenses on a case by case basis [...] Console games are a very closed market where GPL games can not go, publishers won’t touch them, and this was the only way to bring the Nexuiz experience to consoles.

So:

• They have a Quake 1 license
• The engine will just be Quake 1 + the code they could relicense
• They have removed all the original game code
• All Nexuiz and Nexuiz will share is the name
• There won't be any contributions from IllFonic
• GPL and consoles don't mix.