MP3 or Ogg Support

[frag.machine]

Well, I am not here to patrol the actions of people (leileilol does it better than me ). If you guys think there's no problem with mixing different code licenses and then make a public release of the result, good luck. I sincerely hope you guys manage to proof me I am flat wrong for being too much cautious; the liberty of free experimentation without worrying about breaking licenses definitively would be positive to our community.

[Spike]

windows95b comes with opengl out of the box.
I've never even seen win95a, but I do know that it also lacks usb and long file names.
personally, I never saw a 3d card before win98.

a user is free to use it how they wish, but when you distribute an engine that requires opengl, you generally expect that its for a computer that supports opengl well enough for it to be of use - ie: probably at least win98.

In which case it is a system component in the majority of systems that will run it. I don't see the issue. :P

[mh]

[Baker]

[frag.machine]

[mh]

The annoying thing is that I strongly suspect that the intention of the GPL is very much not to prohibit you from linking with non-free third-party libraries. Instead it's to prevent a situation where I could take something like the Quake engine, put all of my own code changes into a static lib, make that static lib non-free, then link to it.

Unfortunately the quite murky (and - admittedly - naive) GPL 2 text leaves it open to interpretation (or open to misunderstanding of the intention; or not, depending on which side of the fence you sit on).

This suspicion is pretty much confirmed by the GPL 3 FAQ entry that basically says "you can link with non-free 3rd party libraries".

[Baker]

[mankrip]

[Baker]

I wouldn't do this except -- well -- except this is always the kind of thing I normally do.

Supervilliian License Violators or Quake Family Tree?



Under some "interesting" interpretations of the GPL, you don't have a list of innovative engine modders but rather a criminal list of GPL violators. Well, feel free to view the above image as a picture of Quake super-villainy of license violators --- I find the very idea offensive.

If you want to use the far-fetched interpretation of the GPL, how can the Windows version of DarkPlaces be compiled on Linux -- I mean, if you take the silly argument posed in this thread literally, there are no Windows 95 components available on Linux therefore they'd all have to be third party. And gcc on Linux certainly doesn't supply them.

Some of the ideas raised in this thread remind me of nerds sitting around and debating whether Darth Maul or Count Dooku would win in lightsabre fight.

There is a reason it requires a JD and to belong to the American Bar Association in, well, the United States to practice law [for the most part].

Some of the ludicrous ideas put forth in this thread are offensive at the minimum and out of this world and entirely disconnected with reality at the maximum. The mere idea that compiling the q1source and distributing it violates the GPL is a novel idea.

I reserve the right to continually trash some of the stupid ideas raised in this thread. Not just for fun, but because it is "The Right Thing" (TM) to do.

Common Sense (TM) - It didn't get us into this argument, but it sure as Fuck(TM) can get us out of it!

[Spike]

the linux version of gcc that compiles for windows is named mingw, as are the libraries provided to compile for windows.
by linking against libGL.so in linux, you link against a system componant, but pretty much everything else is linking against a compiler componant.

You could argue that linking against the dx sdk is the standard way to utilize a major windows componant, and you'd likely get away with it. Certainly noone would care. It is not explicitly stated that this is permitted, however.

The GPL covers distribution only. Imho, so long as your .exe does not statically link to non-gpled works, and contains no non-gpled headers, you can dynamically link how you want, so long as the additional libraries are optional (plugins or whatever) or system componants (again optional, as you can run them on annother system). But is that what the gpl actually says? no. It makes no distrinction between static or dynamic linking.
But it only covers distribution. Thus you could argue that if it is the user that linked, after distribution, then the GPL was not violated.

Either way, *PLEASE* kill scitech's mgl in your version of winquake... seriously, kill it. now. More recent versions are distributed under a dual license including LGPL (in which case you should probably update to resolve any/all arguments). But kill it anyway. :P
With winquake, you don't even need the dxsdk directory, as quake doesn't utilise any directx features that are not already provided by the compiler's version of the sdk (msvc6 anyway, msvc5 might not even have a dxsdk, never used vc5).
With those two changes, an engine will comply with any interpretation of the GPL (without exceptions), allowing you to use code from other GPL projects.

[frag.machine]

[mh]

[Downsider]

[Baker]

[mh]