To say the least this is an interesting take on why iD should at least consider moving Doom 3 towards open source goodness. However, he seals himself once he puts it down like this:
Could it be financial reasons? MySQL is released under the GPL, and MySQL AB makes money on proprietary licenses (paradoxical as it first may seem). As long as a company is liked, open source is a fine business model.
Of course that is the reason. Game engines as complex as Doom 3′s get licensed for millions of dollars. Gaming companies can’t depend on just the selling of their games to sustain theif lifelines, especially when you have a release schedule like iD’s (years apart). Another thing to take note is that MySQL went from Open Source to licensing, not the other way around.
In the end is just a geek’s dream that one day a company like iD will release their game engines immediately under the GPL (or whatever) once their game launches.
Just to pick a nit, MySQL wasn’t always free-as-in-beer… when I first looked at it IIRC, they required any commercial users to pay a licensing fee, which is no longer the case. Not sure if they were always open source or not.
We can at least take heart with the fact that id do have a history of releasing their old engines under GPL, which is more than most developers do.
It is rumoured that Quake 3′s engine will be GPL’d by the end of the year.
Yeah I saw that as well Dan. Good stuff, but not too many people are interested in playing games that use games engines from 4 years ago. However, this does provide some great real-world examples for budding programmers.
Hats off to id.
While I agree with your statement Scrivs, I think that it was a great idea for them to open source the original Doom engine. Just look at all the ports of it that offer real 3D support, and even get it running as a real Windows app? I guarantee that this wouldn’t have happened had they not open sourced it.
Granted, not as much can be gained from open sourcing the Q3A engine, but it definitely can’t be a bad thing for them to do.
Oh, I totally think it’s a good idea to eventually open source their technology. Just not do it immediately as the guy in the article suggested.