Blood and its source license

[Graf Zahl]

I don't disagree that this was much lower risk code, especially since as you mention ZDoom took liberties to emulate rather than replicate in many instances (much to the dismay of the vanilla purists). At the high level though if any code was taken at all you'd be bound to the license for that code, which until SVE was no license at all. There's probably some wiggle room since much, if not all, of the code taken could probably be argued as trivial or something along those lines. But at this point we're definitely firmly in armchair lawyer territory.

Sure, but on the other hand, back then ZDoom was still bound by the Doom license, i.e. no commercial distribution, contained code with Raven's license and the Strife code was most definitely *not* given some inappropriate license like GPL or BSD, so it never entered the territory where it granted inappropriate rights to the code derived from disassembling Strife. The GPL change only occured at a time when the situation was clear.

Now as you can probably imagine I don't personally care since as far as I'm concerned these reverse engineered ports are made in good faith and just benefiting the respective companies. More sales from the game being more accessible, and the fact that they'd be within their rights to take the port and use it themselves without contributing back. They'd have to be unbelievably stupid to exercise their right to shut them down.

I think the best role model here is Microsoft and Wine. They never acted against it but they also never acknowledged it. So if that's the right way for a company that was known as one of the biggest bullies in the business, it must have some legal merit.

[Blzut3]

I think the best role model here is Microsoft and Wine. They never acted against it but they also never acknowledged it. So if that's the right way for a company that was known as one of the biggest bullies in the business, it must have some legal merit.

Speaking of biggest bullies seemingly allowing things: Nintendo has seemingly allowed the reconstructed Super Mario 64 source code to hang around. Which honestly shocks me.

[sinisterseed]

I think the best role model here is Microsoft and Wine. They never acted against it but they also never acknowledged it. So if that's the right way for a company that was known as one of the biggest bullies in the business, it must have some legal merit.

It gets even better, I've recently discovered that there's some Frankensteinian reverse-engineered Windows OSes out there and Microsoft hasn't nuked them and their authors into orbit up to this day.

Granted, they're dogshit, but you get the idea . And I agree too, someone to take those reverse-engineered game efforts down must be unbelievably stupid considering they're effectively boosting the games' popularity since the games can now be played easily and natively on modern operating systems and get more features and QoL improvements, it's literally a win-win scenario. I can only imagine how lucious' Force Engine effort is going to boost the sales and popularity of the supported titles.

[Rachael]

Other than Nintendo -

Even as amoral and as greedy as a corporation is - even they recognize the merits of letting projects like BloodGDX and NBlood and many many others like it to continue to exist. Source ports have kept the interest in old irrelevant games alive, and however little $$ that is compared to a traditional modern release (which, let's be honest, it really is not much, it won't even make a full percentage of their total income) - it's still a net boost in profits and no marketing is required for that.

For some reason Bethesda has been more the outlier on this, actually. They are way more protective of the Doom property than I've seen any other company over quarter-century old releases, and actually do continue to support, develop, and market the game, even its ancient 1993/1994 version.

[Phredreeke]

It gets even better, I've recently discovered that there's some Frankensteinian reverse-engineered Windows OSes out there and Microsoft hasn't nuked them and their authors into orbit up to this day.

Well there's ReactOS which I already mentioned earlier in the thread.

I don't think it poses any threat to MS. It may even benefit them in the unlikely case another antitrust lawsuit comes up.

[sinisterseed]

For some reason Bethesda has been more the outlier on this, actually. They are way more protective of the Doom property than I've seen any other company over quarter-century old releases, and actually do continue to support, develop, and market the game, even its ancient 1993/1994 version.

I wonder just how much input might Bethesda even have into all this, which I honestly doubt is much. After all Doom classic re-releases have been around for decades, long before they acquired id Software. PSX Doom, Xbox, Xbox 360, GBA, 3DO, SNES, Sega Saturn, 32X, BFG edition, Atari Jaguar, you name it, they've probably done it already.

I think id just wants to keep it very much alive, despite source ports doing that just fine and keep making numerous renditions of the classics.

[Talon1024]

I think the best role model here is Microsoft and Wine. They never acted against it but they also never acknowledged it. So if that's the right way for a company that was known as one of the biggest bullies in the business, it must have some legal merit.

Although Wine may theoretically pose a threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the PC market, it poses no threat in practice. Wine makes it easier for Windows users to switch over to Linux or macOS, but Wine is not a reason to use alternative OSes in and of itself.

[Chris]

I think the best role model here is Microsoft and Wine. They never acted against it but they also never acknowledged it.

While maybe not directly, Microsoft did its fair share of spreading FUD in the direction of Wine. Claiming software patents relating to certain GUI elements and with DirectX. They've also worked against it:

However, the Windows Update software will block updates to Microsoft applications running in Wine. On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows Registry for the Wine configuration key and would block the Windows Update for any component.

[markanini]

Is Microsoft really legally obliged to share access to windows updates to everyone?

[Graf Zahl]

Certainly not to people who do not own a valid license. There's also another issue: Microsoft cannot give any guarantees that any of their updates won't break on Wine so it may be wiser not to update any software installed on that platform.

[Chris]

Is Microsoft really legally obliged to share access to windows updates to everyone?

Of course not, but I was responding to "[Microsoft] never acted against [Wine]", not "[Microsoft is] legally obliged to share [with Wine]".

There's also another issue: Microsoft cannot give any guarantees that any of their updates won't break on Wine so it may be wiser not to update any software installed on that platform.

So because it may break, just ensure it does break? If there's an update that breaks in Wine, Wine would like to know so it can be fixed. Forcing it to break, even if it would work (or preventing proper testing and diagnosis on Wine's side), seems more malicious to me than preventative. I mean, the lillith mod...

[Rachael]

There's also another issue: Microsoft cannot give any guarantees that any of their updates won't break on Wine so it may be wiser not to update any software installed on that platform.

So because it may break, just ensure it does break? If there's an update that breaks in Wine, Wine would like to know so it can be fixed. Forcing it to break, even if it would work (or preventing proper testing and diagnosis on Wine's side), seems more malicious to me than preventative. I mean, the lillith mod...

I'm positive that Graf was referring to the software after it is updated, not the update software itself.

And quite frankly I do agree with that. If you are using my software in a way that I did not specifically sanction and test for, then don't obligate me to support it. It's not so much about trying to break Wine as much as it is "we don't have any interest in this, we don't want to test for it, so we're not going to commit the resources to ensure things continue to work after you use it".

It's like for instance people running GZDoom on a Vulkan wrapper API like Ashes or something to transform GZDoom into a Direct3D application. It may work - it may not - but how can we know, or fix it, if we've never done it before?

Of course - in our case for GZDoom - we'd be happy to accept contributions and support to get it working but we still will not specifically sanction people doing that. (Well, for now, anyway.... ) In Microsoft's case, Wine is a direct competition to their bottom line, so they have financial incentive not to support it. It definitely isn't ideal, but hey, capitalism, baby! And in that case Microsoft is doing what has generally been accepted to be "the right thing" in trying to protect itself, even though it is kind of dicky.

Another example might be like people who keep trying to compile GZDoom on OpenBSD even though we've repeatedly explained that they do not update their compiler frequently enough to keep up with the new features that we'd rather have than holding ourselves back for an operating system virtually no one uses. Sure - patches to fix it are welcome - but they are frequently done in an intrusive way that introduces the possibility of breaking things on perfectly updated OS's that we do, in fact, support.

[Chris]

And quite frankly I do agree with that. If you are using my software in a way that I did not specifically sanction and test for, then don't obligate me to support it. It's not so much about trying to break Wine as much as it is "we don't have any interest in this, we don't want to test for it, so we're not going to commit the resources to ensure things continue to work after you use it".

Absolutely. If someone uses software in a way that it wasn't designed to, the developer has no obligation to help or even acknowledge any problem that may arise, so long as it works when used as intended. Using any Windows program under Wine is at the user's own risk (unless the developer or someone explicitly supports Wine, like Valve does with its whitelist of games run under Proton). But that's not what's going on here. In this case, Microsoft did try to break Wine, by purposely checking for it and causing the update program to fail even if it might otherwise work. They committed to and put in resources to ensure things don't work with Wine (and yes, they have a right to do that so long as it still works for their legitimate customers, but it goes against the statement that "They never acted against" or "never acknowledged" Wine, which is what I was pointing out).

[Graf Zahl]

I don't think that "we will not update our software if it runs on an unsupported platform" qualifies as breaking the platform.

It's not really that much different from "Hey, it looks like you are still using Windows XP, OurCoolSoftware has Windows 7 as its minimum requirement so we're sorry that we cannot provide you this update."

[markanini]

But, you see, MS worked against Win 7 and acknowledged it's existence.