An Open Letter to Raven Software and Activision

To the staff of Raven Software and Activision, Inc.:

We are a group of programmers, designers, and administrators from the online Doom community and the game industry who have an interest in seeing the GNU General Public License applied to the previously released source code of the games Heretic and Hexen, created by Raven Software. We are approaching you in this open letter after several years of tenative discussion with various employees, as well as a public petition effort, which has to date garnered almost three hundred signatures (see the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/qhhgpl/petition.html).

We are requesting that this already public source code be placed under a new license because the current Activision End-User License Agreement which accompanies it makes it legally impossible to make meaningful use of the source code. In 1998, John Carmack gave permission for the Doom source code to be placed under the GPL, and since that time, virtually all Doom source modification projects have changed to this license. Unfortunately, the Activision EULA is legally incompatible with this license for several reasons:

  1. The EULA makes questionable the right to freely distribute both the original source and any modifications to it.
  2. The EULA explicitly forbids commercial use of anything derived from the source code. While none of our community members have any interest in commercial exploitation of the Doom, Heretic, or Hexen source code, applying any additional restrictions to code placed under the GPL is not allowed.
  3. The EULA is not meant for source code and includes clauses which are vague or meaningless in this context, including clauses addressing distribution of binary data files and reverse engineering.

The GNU General Public License is widely considered the best license for free/libre software. It is used by thousands of projects, including the GNU/Linux operating system. Information about the license can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

We ask you to keep in mind several points when considering placing the source code under this license:
  1. Placing the online distribution of the source code under the GPL will not hamper your ability to license the code under other terms. You retain copyright and ownership of the source code.
  2. The GPL does not extend its terms to trademarks. Heretic, Hexen, the Serpent Riders, and all related characters and stories remain the exclusive property of Raven and Activision.
  3. Placing the game's code under the GPL does not affect the license of the binary data required to play the games. This means that everyone who uses the compiled source needs to possess a legal copy of the games. This means that the GPL will not harm sales of the games, but may rather increase them as a result of the increased ability to run these games under modern operating systems.
  4. Immediately after the initial source code release in 1999, then-employee Ken Hoekstra publicly stated that the restrictive EULA was included with the source code by mistake and indicated his intent to change it. However, this was never completed before he left the company.
  5. The Hexen 2 source code has already been released under the GPL.

We respect your work greatly and as a result, we would like to be able to safely and legally add Heretic and Hexen compatibility to our Doom source modifications. In order to do this, we need to have access to the source code in a GPL-compatible form. In order to help you help us, we have already prepared a GPL distribution of the Heretic and Hexen source code archive. This means that should your approval be given, you would need to expend no further effort. The GPL source code archive could be distributed immediately without need for work on your part. All of the files in the archive are identical to the original distribution except for addition of a GPL header comment to each file. The text of the license would also be included in whole.

We sincerely hope that you will consider this request and relicense the source of these great games. Under the current EULA, the release is all but useless. The GPL would give these games a chance to live again.

Yours truly,

The undersigned: