Heretic and Hexen GPL'd

[evilhomerdoomer]

In a surprising move, James Monroe of Raven Software emailed Quaser of Team Eternity (http://doomworld.com/eternity) notifying him that the Heretic and Hexen source code has been released under the GPL license. Check it out here. (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=238655)

This is great news, Doom ports can freely incorporate the code and the possibility of "Chocolate Hexen/Heretic" is awesome.

[sLydE]

We've been waiting for this for so long.

Wow, it's been 2 years (http://digg.com/software/Final_Attempt_to_Get_Heretic_Hexen_GPL_d) since the petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/qhhgpl/petition.html).

[CrazedImp]

I don't see why this wasn't done earlier. Doom was a much bigger game than Heretic or Hexen ever was.

Eh well, finally I guess.

[jake250]

I'm sorry to play the ignorant one here, but what does it do?

I've already seen so much from Heretic and Hexen, I thought the source was already out. But I have no idea how all this really works.

[g6672D]

I will post something more informative once I stop running around cheering.

[Doom_Dude]

This is awesome news. Very surprising! Now it should be interesting to see what happens next. :D

[KuriKai]

This should mean doomsday can be fully put into ubuntu's repo^^
Which is a job I will try and do

[g6672D]

In the Main repo? If so, could it be done for Debian too?

[KuriKai]

yeah
blahblahblah filler text

[g6672D]

Response to jake250:

Basically, Raven license denies rights that are required in order to license something under the GNU GPL. Because you have to comply with the Raven license to use its source code, you cannot mix this with a GPL'd project, such as Doomsday.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html

[MR_ROCKET]

But now I suppose they can under GPL version 2.

[g6672D]

I didn't explain very much as it was about 7:00AM when I posted that. As in, I'd been awake for a while. Heh.

FIXED: (hopefully)

If they used v3, it would've caused problems because the Doom source is only v2.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility

All this is so much fun...

[Ajapted]

If they used v3, it would've caused problems because the Doom source is only v2.
Doom, Quake, Quake II and Quake III source codes are all GPL2+, they all say "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.".

Mixing them with v3 is fine (the result will become v3).

[Aliotroph?]

This is pretty sweet. Clears up a lot of issues with a lot of ports. :D

[g6672D]

My fail for not looking at the Doom source code files. Yes, you're right. They are v2 or later. As for the Heretic/Hexen sources...

This code is copyright Activision 1996-1998
[edit 2 Sep 2008] The code is release under GNU GPLv2 (see LICENSE)

Only v2. Eek! So, no mixing them with v3.

[Aliotroph?]

I wonder if that was intended or if they didn't read the section carefully about different versions of the license.

[Ajapted]

Never noticed the Heretic/Hexen release was GPLv2 only.

I doubt that was intentional, it seems to me that this release was done pretty quickly. For example they should have added license text to every file (Quasar even offered to do it for them) but they never did.