GPL for Heretic and Hexen? That would be a good thing
![[heretic]](http://nicubunu.ro/pictures/heretic.png)
About 10 years ago I had a group of friends (or should I cal them gaming-buddies? anything, but not acknowledge they were my coworkers) who preferred Heretic for network play (in the detriment of Doom or Quake), so I had a lot of fun with it. As a consequence, I will always have a bit of nostalgia about it and enjoy a run of the game.
As we can see from the Doom example, GPL is a real chance for such a game to get new life injected into it, so I pretty much agree with the open letter to Raven Software and Activision for a license change to GPL and signed the petition. Not last, that would be awesome also for the Linux gamers.
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Interesting, but vavoom (packaged in Fedora) seems to be GPL and can already play the Heretic and Hexen maps.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, installing the Fedora package creates menu entries for both games that will download the shareware data files on first run if you don't already have them.
YESSS!!!!... I loved these games, in fact I liked them much more than Doom. I remember being very happy with an OpenGL port called GL_Hexxen that improved much the 486esque-graphics with all sort of modern effects.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a great boon for IDSoftware to free both games that now are almost abandonware. If they launched them as Gnu/Linux/Free software it would graner ID a lot of thankfulness from the FOSS community and Im sure it would help improve the sales of the EnemyTerritory Linux version!!!
SubSonica I don't think those games are the property of id software, the petition is addressed to Activision and Raven Software who published and developed the game based on id's Doom engine (with important modifications).
ReplyDeleteDear Nicu: You are right!, what a mistake on my part!, I though they were developed by ID but the fact is that they were (and still are) DISTRIBUTED by ID.
ReplyDeleteHexxen and Heretic can be downloaded for 15$ from ID's servers.
http://www.idsoftware.com/store/index.php?view=vintage
I wonder how much money they are doing out of this nowadays: I am sure Raven (and ID) would earn much more from the good publicity that liberating those two great games would give them.
The petition is for the source code, not for the binary data, so opening the code would not decrease the sales, people will still need the data (WADs).
ReplyDeleteAf for how much they sell... I guess not much, those are old DOS games, I don't think they work on Vista and I'm not sure about XP either (DosBox being probably the best chance).