To those of you who have been around Quakeworld 6-7 years, Quakeworld was the penultimate model community of free and open source (FOSS) and remains so today. So much that in fact the QuakeOne.com was largely modeled around the concept of the old FuhQuake.net site of collective community development but for NetQuake.

Nexuiz, launched in 2005, was the first free and open source shooter ever and is currently under assault by an evil scheme to steal the name "Nexuiz" from the mappers and modelers and the rest of the community who helped develop the game. Nexuiz is based on the DarkPlaces Quake, an NQ and beyond engine that can connect to QW servers that has been of paramount importance of the Quake and Quakeworld community and was written by LordHavoc.

For those of you who are interested, please read this thread:

http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6043

To make a long story short, there is an active and so far successful effort to steal the Nexuiz name to make a console first person shooter. To those that admire the Quakeworld community and the concept that the Quakeworld community has of pure open source (ezQuake, NQuake, Ktx, and on and on and on ...) this an outrage.

I just want to draw attention to this problem in the larger original Quake community. Like Warsow and Open Arena, Nexuiz has long had the reputation of being a totally free first person shooter and now it is under assault.

It's a fantastic turn of events except for the usage of the unaltered name. I don't really get why they do that, the name always seemed to turn people off.

Nexuiz as a game has failed in my eyes due to a missing direction of art, gameplay and what not. It seems more like a playground for many things.

This does not change the FOSS nature of Nexuiz. I am not even sure what content they are taking with them. The content is GPL so they would have to release things.

LordHavoc is working with Illfonic. Vermeulen, the "founder" of Nexuiz is part of the deal too. This is not stealing from him. I think the community overestimates itself or you do.

The only failure of Nexuiz, in my opinion, is the frame-per-second.

Otherwise, what they have achieved in maps, models and textures is a very good for a free and open source FPS. And as a matter of game modes.

I'm not sure what angle of criticism you have of the Nexuiz community aside from FPS. I mean, you might complain about X, Y, Z but the game delivers IF you have decent FPS (I don't, personally).

If I got it right then Nexuiz (source code) = Quake s. c. + DarkPlaces s. c. + Nexuiz s. c. and they made a proper deal and bought license to all three parts of the source code so that they can use it. Alien Trap who created Nexuiz (source code and simply "the whole game" was part of the deal.

What's the problem then?

I don't understand this, they are porting Nexuiz to consoles? They paid Alien Trap to use the name? They pay LordHavoc for new hacks?

What is the problem exactly? All source code that is based on the Quake Source will have to be released to the public. I don't know if DP got support for some external plugins that LordHavoc can sell without the GPL license, but that is probably possible, anything else would have to be released.

Regarding the Nexuiz content, if this is owned by Alien Trap, then they are free to re-license it if they feel like it. So maps/models/sounds based on this commercial license would not have to be released by Illfonic.

But tbh, I still don't understand the issue? Please explain.

However they bought the special license from Id Software that allows you to use Quake engine as closed source. And the same for DarkPlaces and Nexuiz.

they still have to keep the gpl'ed parts in gpl and upload all their patches to the already gple'd code(that has been changed outside of the original 'quake' code.. nothing interesting here

I don't think so. As I got it there are no GPLed parts, Quake source was bought, DarkPlaces part was "bought" and so was Nexuiz part. They are not bound by GPL due to this.

Only if DP has any code that LordHavoc didn't create or owns the copyright to, you are free to re-license what you own. But you can't re-license someone elses code, I don't know what is in DP, but I would expect that LordHavoc did it all himself.


This is all possible, but it all depends on Nexuiz, and DP having copyrights on all their content/code.

Moved to "Offtopic" as it's not really Quakeworld related.

I played this game a few years ago with ruskie and it was just awful :/ But i guess its pretty lame to steal sth like that

Nobody stole anything, console version is produced in cooperation with project founders. They paid for everything they need from open source Nexuiz. Is it that surprising that bunch of guys want to earn cash out of their work? I think people who complain the most are community devs who are angry they didn't get involved and won't get piece of $$$ cake. And i don't see how this can do any damage to original, it's console-only, players won't leave pc version for this. Actually, PC Nexuiz will get some attention out of it, and devs stated that they will open-source some serious stuff: code (not whole actually), art assets etc. so PC community can use it to enhance PC Nexuiz. And people who speak how they ruined Nexuiz mood and art direction must be joking, Nexuiz is lacking solid art direction, it's just bunch of stuff throw in. Warsow, Alien Arena, ETTF - these free FPS have solid art direction... Nexuiz don't look much better than quake2world which is still alpha and many assets are just placeholders.