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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

This headline is a bit sensationalist. His tweet at the end says - "I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case."

He also says - "but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns".

It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as possible. On this metric, yes BSD would have been a superior choice.

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Counter point: I don't think it's sensational.

I interpreted his words directly as he wishes he gone a different direction given what he knows now. At the time he thought GPL was the best move, and now how he doesn't.

HNTitle at the time of my reply: "John Carmack wishes he'd used the BSD license instead of the GPL"

He also said in the thread that his partners wouldn't have gone for it, so he may have thought BSD was better back then too, but went with what he could do.

Releasing the engine code at all was a big deal back then, and inspired some others to do so, but others sometimes had more restrictive than GPL licenses; GPL is certainly better than a license prohibiting commercial use.

Genuinely curious: have there been any best-selling AAA games released under an open-source license of any kind since Quake 2 was GPL'd? It feels like a huge outlier that any release at all was agreed to, never mind quibbling over which license it picked.

Does Return to Castle Wolfenstein count as a best-seller or a AAA game?

quake 3 :p

> GPL is certainly better than a license prohibiting commercial use.

The GPL prohibits some commercial use.

The BSD license does not.

> The GPL prohibits some commercial use.

> The BSD license does not.

Really a nitpick but is this actually true?

I mean the GPL actually defends your right to do whatever you want with the software including selling or renting it out.

What it restrict is what limitations you can put on those who use it, but (and here comes the nitpick): prohibiting others from using something in a certain way isn't what I'd call "commercial use" or "use". I guess a lawyer could argue that but in everyday speak, no.

Not a native speaker though.

Yes, it is true in the way that you're talking about it.

> I mean the GPL actually defends your right to do whatever you want with the software including selling or renting it out.

But realistically, practically, you can't. There is nothing to sell if the software has to be open source. The list of commercial GPL applications is really short compared to the millions of applications which include BSD-licensed code.

This is not true. Many small but successful companies are released their code using AGPL3 license, so you can see and contribute to the code, but cannot compete with them using the same code.

The typical business model is a paid hosting and paid support for the product.

> so you can see and contribute to the code, but cannot compete with them using the same code.

You actually can.

You just cannot without giving back.

That's the intended beauty of it.

Edit: let me point out that I am not an AGPL evangelist. I'm less annoyed at it than I used to be but I still prefer liberal licenses for almost everything.

The GPL may make commercial use infeasible, but the Descent public license has gems like:

> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE END-USER USE THE COMPUTER CODE CONTAINED HEREIN FOR REVENUE-BEARING PURPOSES

Which is still better than no source release. But it doesn't get your code out and used by other projects.

The BSD also prohibits some commercial use.

How?

You need to attribute. So commercial projects that do not want to attribute are not permitted to use the code.

this does not in any way prevent commercial use

Really? So if I want to include BSD code without attributing in my commercial software, I can distribute the binary?

That’s rhetorical. I can’t do so legally without receiving a different license for the copyrighted code.

The counter example to what you claim is trivial to construct.

Yes, you can, assuming we're talking about the modern BSD license.

So, your point was?

This is wrong. 3-clause BSD requires reproduction of copyright notice. You cannot distribute commercial derivatives of BSD-licensed code without including attribution. It’s literally clause two.

That’s why I’ve asked about the modern BSD license, the one without the advertising clause. But even with the old one, having to add one more disclaimer to the usual page of disclaimers somewhere in the documentation is not a problem, while meeting requirements of copyleft licenses - even non-viral ones - can be problematic.

2-clause BSD also requires reproduction of the copyright notice. It’s clause two.

how does commercial use require you to delete the license text?

Since game engines exist as middleware, the code has always been available to those that bought them, if not directly, as additional option.

I think you're right; this is more about choosing the right license to support your means than a general BSD vs GPL.

I find interesting his point of view compared to his partners': he would have preferred if the code was used by more people, his partners were more worried perhaps about competition (if anyone released a game based on their code, they had to contribute the changes back; which is something id could use as long as they keep that engine GPL).

While your theory is quite possible, it is worth noting (just to make sure that the premise of GPL is well-defended) that it is also possible his partners were more concerned about "freedom": that their new engine should benefit the commons rather than getting co-opted by people who don't care about end users, and that they would have preferred that their groundbreaking technology encourage more open source games.

My read is very close to yours.

> It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as possible. On this metric, yes BSD would have been a superior choice.

You basically made the point on why using the BSD license would've been superior...

There are a lot of things the GPL prevents and Carmack is spot on about it.

For the particular metric John cares about, yes definitely. But there are other metrics out there by which GPL would have been a superior choice.

And those are? The GPL is far more restrictive, I can't see anything valuable that the GPL would contribute here.

As he says in the linked tweet: the major value the GPL contributed is the code being open-sourced in the first place, since his co-copyright-holders would never have agreed to license it BSD. The alternative to the GPL, in this case, was "(c) All Rights Reserved", which is still how most other old games are licensed.

So valuing that his co-holders didn't want to opensource is good for the open source community? That seems backwards.

Que? They were obviously fine with open-sourcing, just not under BSD license.

GPL is more restrictive for the developers, but more liberating for the users. If you care about your users, you'd use GPL.

It's just a matter of perspective.

GPL lets you release source code and enforce that no one can modify it without releasing their modifications. A lot of people like that "restriction" because it maximizes the amount of source people have access to.

No, the main point still stands that he wished that he had used the other license. Sensationalist implies that some accuracy is being sacrificed.

Does not look like that was his only metric: "but I'm pretty sure there would have been more total users of the code, likely making the amount shared in the open still greater."

I fail to see a contradiction.

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