If Bethesda Bought Out Modern Doom Source Ports

[Gez]

what?

Id still has ownership for the original source code and can use it under their own terms. A license is for other people, not for the rights owners.The recent Doom rereleases published by Bethesda are not covered by the GPL.

[wildweasel]

.....Huh?

[Redneckerz]

I mean it kind of does.

It does not. Bethesda can do whatever with the raw Doom code, but nothing else - I reckon not even pulling the official LinuxDoom 1.10 source release.

Besides, any such action would be a full 180 degree spin on the entire Doom/IDSoft legacy of open sourcing works and even using that as a base for new releases (Doom Classic, Doom IOS) that its extremely unlikely anything else occurs

But you should ask Carmack, since he instigated this silly open source nature to begin with!

I obmitted the rest of your post, because frankly, it read like word salad. Besides, as they are the owner, they don't have to license their own code again. Please read up on what the various licenses allow and not allow.

what?

Id still has ownership for the original source code and can use it under their own terms. A license is for other people, not for the rights owners.The recent Doom rereleases published by Bethesda are not covered by the GPL.

Exactly. Since they run inside a Unity framework, open sourcing that code might be a legal layer they do not want to go towards - Unity isn't open source, despite parts of the source code being released.

Doom 3 BFG is a different tale - Though Doom also runs in a framework there (id Tech 4), that could be open sourced, because Carmack was still around + id Tech 4 was already open source. Though Doom 3 BFG actually has id Tech 5 code incorporated aswell, afaik the Doom classic part does not use any of that.

This isn't a corrective response to you, by the way - Just a fuller explanation of things to the best of my (flawed) memory.

[Rachael]

what?

Id still has ownership for the original source code and can use it under their own terms. A license is for other people, not for the rights owners.The recent Doom rereleases published by Bethesda are not covered by the GPL.

This. ^

@cybie69:
If you release a work under the GPL, you yourself (as the original author) are allowed to do anything you want - with that work as it was released originally by you. The only way the GPL starts to creep in and limit you is if you start to assimilate other people's work covered by the same license.

Bethesda did not do that. They pretended source ports don't exist (which is perfectly within their rights) and developed it in-house on their own. The original Doom source code was an id Software work, not exclusively John Carmack's (who did have contributions from others during the development of the game). Since the intellectual property rights were transferred to Bethesda during the sale of id Software to said company, that means the Doom source code (which is an id Software intellectual property, not altogether separate from the game Doom itself) also went to Bethesda as well.

Sorry, but while the GPL grants an irrevocable freedom to us to use and manipulate the code (even if they revoked the Doom source code tomorrow), Bethesda still is and always will be the current rights holder to the work.

If you release a source to a project you've been working on as well. If you release it as GPL, then the restrictions of GPL only apply to everyone else and not you, at least up until the point contributions are made using that license.

It's easier to think of every single solitary point of the evolution of the code (or any copyrighted work for that matter) as existing in a time bubble. When it comes to licensing that's exactly what it is. If you take an exact copy of the code from any point in time in the timeline even if it was in the past (as Bethesda did), your full rights that you had at that exact point apply. So if you remember that back in 1996 there wasn't even a license to use the source code for anyone except id Software exclusively (and a few licensees such as Raven and Rogue/Velocity), id Software can take what code they had back then and all their rights along with them, and continue to move forward as if the source release never happened. Even though for us - it did - and thus we are restricted to the licenses we were issued in those times from them.

Now - if Bethesda one day decides to fork GZDoom and add a bunch of features of their own and suddenly release a new game off of it (or, hell, maybe even release the classic Doom re-imagined using GZDoom) - then yes, they will be required to keep the source open under the terms of the GPL because contributions were made under that license and those protective rights are extended to the contributors as well - and if they did not comply they could be liable for a lawsuit for not following it. They could be clever and scrub the entire codebase of all GPL code (and, if you consider that a lot of that code is mostly just libraries, at this point, so they could technically pull it off) then they'd be restricted only under the terms of the BSD - in which case (technically) merely credit being given is all that's required.

GPL is not a sudden magical silver bullet that makes everything required to be open source and that's the end of the discussion. It simply does not work that way. It's a lot more complex and nuanced and requires a lot of deep and critical thinking to understand what your rights really are. You (if you were Bethesda, theoretically, or the FSF for that matter) can't just "George Bush" your way into this argument to get what you want.