anotak

sorry, i should be clearer, it's not about the carveout. i actually agree with the carveouts, and wish other ports had done something like that. it's about the way the implementation was done, about id's name being on it, etc my brain is a bit fried and i don't know if i'm expressing myself well in this post, compared to the long one i spent a long time thinking about and editing and finishing up. i'm going to step away from responding for a little while because i don't want to go back and forth quickly on this, i think that's part of what's lead to the misunderstandings etc essel i consider you a friend and i hope you have a good day

there was a point about this that i written down in my outline and then forgot to actually include in the final post, which was the following: if we sincerely believe that these things are impossible because the folks in question are not capable of reducing the power of id software in any meaningful way, then we should not trust anything they do to expand id software's power either, no matter how minor or seemingly innocuous.

i want to talk about this situation as a whole, but there's been so many posts, not just here, but on various social media sites and private chatrooms, that it's honestly hard to respond to all of it. in some cases a person may have said something polite and civil here, and not so polite on twitter. and i'm mostly trying to hold all that here, instead of responding to one person or singling anyone out. (except for some specific thoughts about things specifically gooberman has said, which i'll get to) Friends several folks i disagree with in this thread, in the past i have considered them friends, or at least friendly. ideally i'd like to continue thinking and feeling that, but i get the general impression that that feeling might not be mutual. i wouldn't compromise what i see as my morals for that, but know that i don't say anything here out of malice or any kind of desire to burn bridges. i took my time thinking on this topic so that i don't come at it hot. i hope you all understand that i'm not here angry-posting or trying to get a last word or anything like that. i have legit concerns, and i know i'm also not alone in them. i'd like to ask people to not discount them as "boring" or jaded-boomerisms or whatever else i have seen people saying in various venues, but legitimately try to understand. especially if you consider me a friend or once considered me a friend. and on the other hand at least one person in this thread that i come close to agreeing with, i otherwise wouldn't ever want to be in a room with. just saying this as an explanation that i'm not doing some us-vs-them shit here, or digging up old beefs. i had and continue to have legitimate concerns, and i was not bringing any of them up to attack anyone who posts here, and it's incredibly frustrating to be seen that way especially by people who i thought trusted me at least a little bit. i should also say i literally have never interacted with dsda-dev/kraflab nor am i aware of the situation with dsdahacked or whatever it is. i'm also sympathetic to the folks coming back from quakecon and suffering from con-plague. i wish you all a speedy recovery, sincerely. i myself have been going through what i'd characterize as a family emergency without going into more detail. i don't say this to play some sort of suffering-olympics or to minimize, just to say: hey, i get it. i've also worked very hard on something (more than once), and had people publicly criticize it to varying levels of civility and had it turn into an enormous clusterfuck while i'm dying inside from tiredness. i'm also sympathetic to that. On "community members": so i want to start this post off by saying something to everyone in this thread, holding every position: a lot of this discussion has revolved around who is a "community member" and who isn't. and an awful lot of misunderstandings and problems and bad feelings are at least partially a result of not realizing that people are meaning different things by this wording. i've seen people express feelings of being "othered" on all sides. i think some of those feelings are a result of this. i'd like to point out that this isn't just about definitions though. it's also about the way we organize our communities and subcommunities. if you think of a person as "not a community member", i ask that you think about why that is. not just, what the facts are about their current situation, but how they ended up there? what pressures in the doom community drive people to leave? are those pressures worth trusting in or supporting implicitly by assigning significance to the current status? what pressures prevent people from joining the community in the first place? what stake do they have in this matter, what stakes did they once have, or might they in the future? Trust: there's been a lot of ask of trust for old friends on behalf of the nightdive folks - but shouldn't that go both ways? there's been a lot of assuming that people who have legitimate concerns are just, trolling? angry for no reason? making shit up for no reason? all sorts of weird accusations have been leveled at the people who have concerns. and the thing about trust going both ways - is that for myself at least, and i suspect others, this started as what felt like a violation of trust, and honestly to me, still feels like one. the thing about trust though, is that it doesn't disappear after one violation, typically. i came here asking questions not because i didn't trust, but because i *did* trust. i trusted folks to give truthful answers. i trusted folks to understand our concerns and not dismiss them. i waited when edward said that explanations were coming in original rerelease thread because i trusted. i trusted that if i came to nightdive folks with a problem, i wouldn't be treated like i was treated. so: where's the trust? On "civility" and "personal attacks" and good/bad faith: it's necessary to link the bits of this thread that were split off into an entirely separate forum without linking them here. while they are gone from the context for future readers, they are still the origin of a lot of this. so, in the original announcement thread for the new kex release, one or two people had some concerns about the GPL, an employee of nightdive told them to hold their concerns, as an explanation from gooberman was coming. i saw this, and i had some similar concerns. so i held off. i figured the post would come when folks were ready to have a good discussion about it. when the "explanation" came and was lacking many key details, i was pretty concerned at that point. i'll get to specific concerns i still have farther down, but the posts i made were not born out of attempting to stir the shit. i may have been a bit abrupt, but i can't say i was insulting in that thread. i never accused anyone who posted here of actual malice, even in private. in retrospect it appears to me that what i said was viewed as an accusation of malice. but many people violate copyrights in good faith and with best intentions. i did approach the situation with distrust, but given the situation with the wad-uploader, is it so surprising that many people's distrust would extend elsewhere? i don't think the wad uploader has been done this way out of malice either, to be clear. i would say the discussion was civil and free of attacks up until gooberman's posts here and especially here in response to me. this was pretty disproportionate to the things i said. i'm not unsympathetic to his feelings (see the first section of this post). but a lot has been said about people having a problem with the ID24 situation being especially uncivil or engaging in personal attacks, without acknowledging the fact that it's directly a response to and a matching of the tone gooberman took with me. and i think the silence on that topic from the people who are for the ID24 standard feels like an endorsement of that tone. this thing gooberman said about me here was a very direct personal attack. this is the first time i've ever been told anything like this. as far as i know, this is not an accurate representation of my reputation. this is not me saying i'm flawless, or without enemies. i'm a pretty fucked up person all things considered, and i know i can be mean and cruel at times, hold grudges, etc. but i don't feel like this was even one of those times. it's with awareness of my flaws that i try to go through my life and do right by people. but as far as i know, this post does not describe me. i've only interacted with gooberman once or twice in passing. i don't really know where this was coming from. gooberman doesn't seem to me to be dishonest or a liar, so it seems to me that someone else said this to him in private. which tells me there are people in this discussion throwing stones and hiding hands. which doesn't strike me as very civil either. it seems like the intent was one of or all of the following: - to discredit me? - to shut me up? - to anger me and cause me to lash out in response? (which goes back to discrediting and possibly retroactively justifying his own attitude) if folks are supposed to take gooberman's claims on good faith, why did he go with this approach? put yourself in the shoes of someone who is understandably skeptical about the situation before reading those two posts, and read them. how do you think you might react or feel, even if you weren't the direct target of this statement? how do you think you might react or feel if the rest of the folks involved seemed to indicate that this was an acceptable way to address these concerns? i'd also like to state that there's been at least one person here i've seen talk about civility and then go elsewhere publicly and post with the exact opposite. which really feels nasty, and i don't understand what even motivates this kind of behavior. Specifically, the GPL and ownership of Chocolate Doom gooberman makes the claim that id software fully owns the components of chocolate doom that interface with his r+r code that was used in the kex port. this is a pretty surprising claim to me. he said that "fraggle forking Doom and calling it Chocolate Doom does not mean he has immediate copyright over the entire codebase". this is a logically valid statement, but it is not an accurate description of what happened. as boris pointed out, chocolate doom has 77 contributors listed on github. and to go further - chocolate doom is older than github. chocolate doom has also incorporate gpl code from other sources. it is a long project of not just fraggle, but an entire community. for gooberman to say what he did, in the way that he did, erases a tremendous amount of work. that exact claim and its phrasing also feels hurtful and insulting (alongside this later post here) to quite a few folks. again, i don't think this is done out of malice, just. a mix of good intentions for making a thing gooberman thought was cool and motivated reasoning. since my previous posts, i reached out to a few people (outside the community with no stake) who have expertise in copyright issues related to the gpl, and explained the situation to the best of my ability while leaving out names. the consensus i have received is that this is a complex/weird enough matter that the only way this could be definitively answered would be were if the contributors to choco took id to court over it. i do not think they would or should do this. and me, as a reasonable person, understand that regardless of how it might shake out in an ideal world, id through beth through microsoft effectively have more money than god, so, you know, they would win. so okay, i guess because that's the reality, it's not a gpl violation. doesn't feel good to me, and it shouldn't feel good to you. "Financial incentives", companies vs people, and why care about the GPL here? the reason i care about the gpl here, and why i think you should care too, is that the gpl is as close as a promise that's been made by id software. the thing about promises and legal contracts and corporations, is that no matter how much we trust xaser or sponge or anyone else that works there, they may not be there next year, or 5 years from now, or 50 years from now. and ideally we'd want this hobby to last a very long time. we have to think longterm. and the thing is, we've already seen these kinds of changes. the main person who seemed to push for gpl-ing code at id software was apparently john carmack, despite his other flaws. and with him gone, and with microsoft's purchase of bethesda, the future for modding feels more and more uncertain all the time. and this isn't about id software being "evil". microsoft arguably is and possibly so is bethesda but also i don't think the current situation is any deeper conspiracy or any such thing. nightdive is mostly a force for good, insofar as any company can be. but even if i trust xaser to be very well intentioned (which i legitimately do, i really do), it's not just about him, it's about whoever his boss's boss's boss is. not just today, but also tomorrow. and even if gooberman doesn't make a single cent off this, he still signed some type of contract with somebody, and at the end of the day, to put id's name on this thing, someone at id is going to sign off on it one way or another. this is about precedent, and giving them power. giving up power to any of these organizations on a long timeline is a mistake, even if there are only positive intentions right now. we've seen lots of other perfectly good companies go to shit because they got bought or people were fired and so on and so forth. it's not a lack of trust to say that just because i trust sponge, i don't inherently trust the next person who has sponge's job if he were to retire, leave, be promoted, be fired, be demoted, and so on. and it's not that i think the next person will be inherently evil either, it's just that their incentives are naturally in conflict with ours. the realities of the corporate world mean that someone in the chain is focused on things like shareholder value, return on investment, covering their own ass legally, etc. and this stuff is simply not the things that the community as a whole cares about or should care about. and again, this someone ultimately will have some responsibility somehow or another over any standard that bears id software's name like that. "financial incentives" is not some rumor-mongering. it's not an accusation of malice, "selling out", bribery, or anything like that. it's just the actual reality of working with a corporation on this stuff. and that's the rub, i think one of the big sources of misunderstanding, of "community members" vs "employees" or in gooberman's case we might say something less specific like "stakeholder". i think some of the folks at least, i know myself in private conversations, have made this distinction not to other, but to talk about that difference in stakes, incentives, power, and having someone above in the chain who signs off on stuff one way or another. again, it's not about trusting individuals! i'll briefly mention graf zahl here. he's not involved in this in any way as far as i know. i mention him because you all know i have a lot of beef with the guy. you all know that i don't trust him. you all know that i dislike him very much. you all know that i'm of the opinion that he does significant harm to the community. but i still would rather have him in charge of anything than anyone who works for an organization that owns parts of doom and has a financial interest in it. i'm serious. leximax and altazimuth, i know we haven't talked in a minute, but i really do think y'all are great people. i've never had a conversation with either of you where i felt mistreated or wronged (unless you count this one). but i'd rather graf zahl than any corporation that has real power. legality aside, i think a further reason i personally am unhappy with implementation of community work like MBF21 is that MBF21 is the result of a large amount of community work. it's based on decades of work by a lot of different authors on boom and various other ports, and a lot of that work is based on the expertise of people who spent a lot of time and energy mapping for doom. and it strikes me as wrong that ultimately id software will get to make a profit on that without paying the majority of the people that actually did the work required for MBF21 to exist (even though i know some work at night dive). i understand what a clean-room implementation is, and i understand that gooberman did not intentionally copy any code, but the thing is that MBF21 is so much more than code. id software ultimately benefits tremendously from the existence of the doom and quake modding communities, and their games would really truly would not exist without us. every game they've worked on since ultimate doom has involved people they hired from the community, who learned design on community tools, and partially with the help of the community. the entire fps industry has been tremendously influenced by piles and piles of games that were worked on by people who came from the doom and quake communities. and not just obscure stuff either, we're talking about unreal (and ut), basically every valve game, thief 2, several of the cod games, etc. people involved with the games industry play doom wads. the community is basically free advertisement, free training for their new recruits, free inspiration for their existing employees, free assistance with searching for new hires, etc. so it makes me a bit sad when they also get to profit off our work and expertise, and the existence of the ID24/MBF21 implementation in the new rerelease allows for a lot of the problems with the problematic uploading-thing to be worse. What should/could id/nightdive/beth/ms do to do right by the community? - the people who posted in this thread on the nightdive "side" could make it clear that, hey, they get it, they understand the concerns, and they understand we weren't trying to be be frivolous or haters for no reason or whatever the hell. like even if you disagree - the old iwads should simply be free to download and redistribute. if you think this is impossible or ridiculous to offer their games for free, consider that many games like starcraft, several command & conquer games, gta2, and even bethesda's own elder scrolls: arena are given away for free. starcraft and command & conquer 1/red alert even had a commercial remaster after, while continuing to allow free distribution of their games. - the iwads should be given some specific license that describes ways that users are allowed to modify or distribute or use them (while not mentioning restrictions - outside of maybe understandably forbidding some commercial use). i can understand something as permissive as CC0 being troublesome for their work on future new-Doom games, but there's some middleground here. right now many mods we make and post are in a zone of grey-legality in all sorts of ways, as derivative works of iwad data, and the my understanding of it is that the legality of it is mostly held up by informal promises in emails sent by people who no longer work at id software. this isn't some accusation of malice at the current id software, but you can never predict the future, and we all want this hobby to be around in 10 or 30 or 100 years, right? they were bought by microsoft indirectly not too long ago, who knows how they will be bought or sold next, and how that will affect things. - id/nd should release much of the kex doom code as gpl, and not just the bits in r+r. "we can't because we call other non-gpl code in other libraries". so strip that code out? this is how doom's code was released in the first place. the dmx library is still to this day closed source, and references to it were removed in the original linuxdoom release. as several folks have pointed out dual licensing is an old practice in the industry. - id should make a formal promise to the community to not interfere in the open source development AND modding, with some amount of legal force behind it. again, it is possible for games companies to make a binding promise to the community about their future releases, such as in the case of magic: the gathering's much-maligned "reserved list" policy. In conclusion: i think that you should want at the last 4 points i listed too, or something similar. and not just idly, if you have the ear of anyone who has the power to make decisions about it, you should speak about it. especially if you work at nightdive or id software and you do care about the community. even if you don't agree about my perspectives on the id24 situation in particular, those last 4 points should still be a desirable goal to you. and the thing is, it is a possible goal. if this all doesn't go anything like how i would like it, then i hope i'm wrong. if i'm proven right, then i'll be real fucking sad about it. and also i'll just say, i hope everyone involved gets some fucking rest. life is hard. as a final note, there is one group of people i DO wish malice upon: if there are any "drama youtubers" reading this thread in order to make a video, go fuck yourself. and fuck the harm you cause for clout and patreon money. i hope you never sleep at night

not a lawyer (don't think anyone else in this thread is either), but: these commits are a derivative work of chocolate doom. they call into functions present in chocolate doom, and functions present in chocolate doom call them. they are based on the logic present in chocolate doom. you can't just separate the code in rum and raisin doom and pretend it exists without its context, or pretend that it would exist without choco. being a derivative work he (or his employers) do not have sole copyright on it. this also implies he received permission to create the derivative work in the first place through the GPL. meaning that he cannot dual license the code, because it is GPL.

i'm frankly not familiar with the situation with fraggle's dehacked code. is this meant to be this relevant clause of the GPL2: i uh. because i don't think this can be "reasonably considered independent or separate works in themselves"

so, the claim that it's a clean room implementation is that he's been working on GPL2 code based on chocolate doom for quite some time?

hey, can we get some further elaboration on this? this is a pretty big claim

so is the explanation for the GPL stuff "we reimplemented it ourselves without using the GPL code"? reading the early part of the thread, that's all a bit unclear to me

an important thing to clarify: do people need to pay money (as in, re-buy this version of the game), in order to report other users uploading their wads without permission?

(edit: error previously mentioned here has been corrected) congratulations to the winners

there is another answer sometimes in life, you have a choice or option, but nobody talks about it around you. lacking the ability to even be aware of it, it's as if you never had the choice in the first place. in these situations, you have to find a way to imagine another path than those you see in front of you.

there's not, and it's not one. this is absolutely its own thing

the following zscript in this spoiler was in DEFY THE OMPHALOS. pastebin link for source here it informs the player that their settings are wrong. this particular implementation goes into a custom player class but it could be reworked to function differently (like with eventhandlers maybe) for that project in particular we ended up needing hardware rendering support and not opengl ES so it detects for that too it also checks for hq resize which isn't a default setting but yeah. i recommend you all use something like this for your maps.

that's weird, i'm pretty sure that's a stronger or equal system in every way than one of the ones i tested it on

not sure what's up with the performance problems here, can i ask what hardware you have? also which renderer are you using also there isn't really an intended order for the 4 maps