[quake3] Re: Greetings

[Erik K.]

Hi, my nickname is 'woekele'. I used to be on the UrT dev team and part 
of what I did was maintaining ioUrbanTerror (the GPL engine). For Urban 
Terror (the sdk mod), I worked on the menus and some other random things.

First I'd like you all to read 
http://ioquake3.org/2007/12/23/urban-terror-41/#comment-69 and the 
"License Stuff" section of 
http://www.urbanterror.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.5

I see Tim is giving his usual speech again :)

On 17-4-2008 16:28, Tim Angus wrote:
> ioUrT depends on UrT as this is its BASEGAME. 

WRONG. Being BASEGAME != depending on. It can run any other mod no 
problem at all by just setting the appropriate fs_game. *So there's no 
GPL violation by ioUrbanTerror.*

> Furthermore, said Q3 mod SDK license states that any distributed works 
> are for use with "QUAKE III ARENA" only. By inference this means not 
> ioq3. Therefore it violates the Q3 mod SDK license.

It actually says that you can use the sdk to CREATE mods for operation 
with Q3A only, it doesn't say the mods are for USAGE with Q3A only. 
Pretty important difference. Urban Terror (the mod) WAS created for Q3A 
and still works fine on it. It just HAPPENS to run on GPL Q3-engines 
too. And nothing forbids that. The UrT team even asked IDsoftware 
directly to make sure they were doing nothing wrong and IDsoftware gave 
them the okay. *So no SDK violation either.*

> If they were distribtuing UrT and ioUrT as separate entities, they 
> probably could get away with it (although the ioUrT dependency on UrT is 
> still potentially an issue).

They ARE separate products, they are just bundled in one zip/installer 
for convenience.

Anyway, as you could read in the first link I gave: "I think the Urban 
Terror mod code should go GPL, cause the coder for Urban Terror barely 
has time to work on it anyway. Also it would avoid all this legal 
hassle. It would be a great form of respect towards IDsoftware and 
ioquake3 coders, who also made their work (the base of Urban Terror’s 
success) available. And of course to be a REAL stand-alone game. The 
assets/copyright/whatever could still stay with the Urban Terror team. 
So yeah, enough reasons to GPL the mod code. However, legally not required."

PS: I am now retired from Urban Terror, so I couldn't really care less 
about all this, but I just can't stand it when I see wrong information 
being passed on.