DarkWar licensing

[T. Joseph Carter]

One of the problems I have been puzzling over for DarkWar is that it
really seems like a commercial project even though it isn't.  I mean,
either development must be closed only to people who will be working on
neither or you need ridiculous accounting measures to figure out who
submitted what exactly.  That's a lot of effort and when people start
being asked questions about their code, be it significant or not, they're
likely to feel like they're being invited to participate in DarkWar just
so we can use their work in Neither.

While I expect that very little from DarkWar that any of us couldn't
easily write almost in our sleep at this point is likely to be reused in
Neither, it has the potential of being a PR nightmare if someone decides
to feel they're being cheated because they're being expected to code
something under a license like the GPL and then have us use it under other
terms.

My understanding of DarkWar is that it is basically Q3A-era tech.  At
least one reasonably complete drop-in engine replacement for Q3A exists as
free software today, and with some minor problems, it's pretty good
overall.  This tells me that we're at a point where that level of
technology basically has no proprietary commercial value unless you are
simply that adverse to open source that you must have something which is
proprietary.

So why not give DarkWar away?  No, I mean really give it away--BSD the
engine.  This will guarantee that everyone knows that anyone can use the
engine however they like.  The bad news is that someone could take it and
produce a non-free binary-only engine for some game.  Because this type of
technology has reached such a high saturation level though, I doubt it'd
be any big loss.  Anything spectacular engine-wise would require just as
much effort with DarkWar as with Quake, and Quake is now basically within
the budget of hobbyists.


I certainly do not believe that BSD is the appropriate license for the
game data since BSD gives insufficient credit (what, somewhere in the
binary data there must be a Copyright notice?  No, that's not quite right)
and pure BSD may not be right for the engine either (perhaps it should be
required to either maintain an intro screen or stick some other "based on
DarkWar" type thingy somewhere?)  But still, that's no different than
being required to maintain a Copyright notice in the output, really, so
it's effectively the same thing.

I think if something like that is the only difference between what Neither
must do and what anyone else must do, then probably people will not be too
terribly opposed.  Or, I figure there's no harm in having the same kind of
credit in Neither for parts of the engine coming from DarkWar if there
wind up being significant pieces which do.

Just an idea to toss around.