gpl anticheater

Tim Angus tim at ngus.net
Sun Sep 4 20:49:24 EDT 2005


On Sun, 4 Sep 2005 12:46:45 -0700 Zachary wrote:
> I personally don't think any GPL punkbuster style program would be
> effective, though I would certainly welcome people to try.

It's unfortunate, but yes. At a fundamental level the client needs to be
trusted to some degree. Any anti-cheat mechanism therefore needs to
pretty much rely on obscurity as its primary means of operation. I don't
really see how this is possible with an open source program.

The double whammy is that since Q3 is now GPL, it cannot be distributed
with any closed source libraries. So implementing a free-as-in-beer
alternative to punkbuster is hampered slightly. Correct me if I'm wrong
(IANAL etc.), but there is no problem with a GPLed application linking
against a non GPL library? At least, not if you dynamically load the
library at runtime as Q3 does with libGL. Right?



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