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Say it ain't so Mr. Carmack!

With all the good news coming out of QuakeCon this weekend (Enemy Territory, Rage, Q3 in a browser!), there was one point of disappointing news for me as a fan if id Software: id has partnered with Valve to deploy their titles on Steam.

Valve has already publicly stated it has no plans for Steam on Linux. Being former Microsoft developers, who is surprised? But id has always been a cross-platform development company and it’s disappointing to see them partner with Valve on this. But I can’t really blame them, as they deserve kudos for monetizing their catalog titles, and the price point is amazing – $70 for all id titles up to and including Doom3 and it’s expansion. That’s amazing – play all their games from Commander Keen to Quake to Doom3. (Yes, I know I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth.)

Now the bad news – it appears that Valve is using DOSBox to make id’s older games playable, which is GPL, without including specific files, such as COPYING.TXT which makes this violate the GPL.

I saw the original story on Slashdot, and it’s an interesting tale of two communities. The HalfLife2.net forums quickly degenerate into mudslinging, especially on pages 4-7, with one user going so far as to, well, read for yourself:

****ing ridiculous. I don’t know how some of you can brush this off as a mere ‘molehill’ or misunderstanding. You Valve and ID apologists sicken me.

The GPL is essentially the word of God, look at it as the 13th commandment: Thou Shalt Distribute The Source And Any Chamges Made Unto It To All Those Who Ask. When God created Adam and Eve he made it such that when they procreate, each of them combine to make the new item and the source modification is passed on down the generations. It is no co-incidence that Richard Stallman appears as we envisage God to appear for he is a true prophet of our time, a visionary who is putting Gods voice into the digital age.

The fact that these heathens dared ignore Gods word and packaged the games without copying.txt is absolutely unforgivable. They will surely rot for eternity in hell as no doubt you who support them will too.

…Which is an interesting take on the GPL that I haven’t necessary seen before. I’ve heard of GNU zealots, but this might take the cake.

The DOSBox forums are a contrast in civility and logic. Instead of Valve bashing and zealotry, DOSBox developers call out the exceptions, and update the thread when Valve does something good, such as adding back the COPYING.TXT file via Steam. The developers seem understanding of the situation so far, and while major questions remain around distributing the source of Valve’s changes, the DOSBox team seem to be taking a wait an see approach.

John Carmack, id’s lead developer and co-owner, has always been a friend of the GPL – he has led the open sourcing of most prior games once the licensees are done using them, resulting in successes such as ioquake3. I’m hopeful this will all be resolved in a good way. And I still wish Valve would put a Steam client on Linux (and OSX) too.

  • in Sports, tv
  • 1 min read

Are you ready for some football?

My favorite time of the year is quickly approaching, as we are just over a month away from the start of the college football season, and the NFL is now in full swing with training camps.

I’ve started to watch a few baseball games this year (especially when the Twins are on in HD), but nothing compares to football for me.

I was surprised to see last night that the newly formed Big Ten Network that launches Aug. 30th, will be included on the basic tier of DirecTV. And here I was already to shell out $10 / month for the sports package. I’m glad I don’t, as NFL Ticket just hit my bill. I’ll be interested to see how much HD bandwidth the Big Ten Network gets, as they keep talking about how they’re launching with the most HD content of any new TV channel. DirecTV’s new satellite doesn’t come online until October with more HD capacity, so this will be interesting to see.

In related news, I’ve gotten my hands on a few Packer tickets this year – I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see Favre play knowing this is probably his last year. (But we say that every year, don’t we?)

10 days until the first preseason game! Are you ready for some football?

Foresight Newsletter Issue 5 Released

The July newsletter is officially out the door. (And I need to stop waiting until the last day of the month to publish and give the translators time to translate).

This month we take a look at the new logo (!), the 2.0 release schedule (one of the more commonly asked questions in IRC), installing packages from rPath repositories outside the default Foresight repositories (yes, people, if you have to, you can install Amarok, but why?!) and one of pscott’s and my favorite pieces of eye candy, Avant Window Navigator. And more!

I really enjoyed writing the AWN howto – it is the first package featured in the newsletter that is not installed by default in Foresight. It was also nice to publish the upcoming 2.0 release schedule publically. It makes the 2.0 release feel more tangible, and puts a stake in the ground we can all work to.

I’m also looking for help in writing the newsletter – anything! Feature a package, a howto, you name it. Help in the wiki or email me stuff and I’ll collaborate on it. This isn’t a one man show. Read it here and don’t forget you can also subscribe to the feed in your favorite feedreader, just add http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter

And thanks for reading the newsletter! Enjoy!

A Feather in Conary's Hat

Reading the article “Mepis to switch from Ubuntu to Debian” one thing jumped out at me:

Woodford explained that Ubuntu is rebuilt almost from scratch every six months using source packages from Debian EXPERIMENTAL.

In using Ubuntu for almost 3 years, that was my experience as well. I formatted and installed fresh more than I just did a apt-get dist-upgrade.

And that is one of the major features of Conary – managing your applications and dependencies so you should never have to “install fresh”. Foresight, using Conary, believes in rolling releases – not big releases every 6 months, but incremental updates to keep you up to date with the latest software and security fixes.