Heretic and Hexen Sources Re-released Under the GPL

In a surprise email from Raven Software employee James Monroe, James "Quasar" Haley of Team Eternity has been notified that the source code for Heretic and Hexen has been re-released under the GNU General Public License, and is now available from Sourceforge.

Having the code relicensed required a community effort spanning almost a decade. At its height, this included an online petition, an open letter, snail mail campaigns, e-mail, an international action item on GNU.org, insider efforts by Chris Rhinehart of Human Head Studios and Doom's own John Romero, and other activities carried on individually by countless community members.

This release is of monumental importance, as it will allow GPL Doom source ports to freely integrate support for Heretic and Hexen without requiring the code to be rewritten from scratch or to be emulated through empirical testing. The door is also now open for new ports such as "Chocolate" Heretic and Hexen, and for such ports to be distributed in free software packages.