Illfonic steals Nexuiz from community

[Lee_Stricklin]

Official Announcement:
http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6043

Thread where it really hit the fan
http://alientrap.org/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 9&start=30

Commercial Site
http://www.nexuiz.com/


These guys took a lot more than just the name and gameplay. They took the Dark Places engine which includes MANY contributions made by the community and they officially stated that there is no intention to release any of the content back to the community. Supposedly all of the contributions that ended up in console version were relicensed by the guys that made them, but we just found out that divVerrent (aka div0) and TZork as well most of the community outside of three of the guys that started the project knew nothing about it. In case you didn't know Nexuiz was built off of an engine that was built from id tech released under the GPL. EVERYTHING including code, content, music, etc. is GPL compliant in the PC version. Under the terms of that GPL you are required to keep the source open and everything freely available and any modifications you make to it can only be distributed under those same terms. These guys STOLE from the community, failed to have a decent chat with us (they locked the original topic actually), and deserve nothing less than bad press. LET EVERYBODY KNOW.

[Phorce]

Don't know much about this yet, but at first glance it looks like prejudice towards GPL being a "weak" or "unenforceable" license. I think a brief search would bring up a number of cases where legal action has upheld the status of GPL and ruled that it has been breached in whatever case and some legal ruling has been enforced as a consequence..

[Lee_Stricklin]

Turns out that Lee Vermeulen the guy that started the project sold the game rights to IllFonic and their original intention was to contact all the authors. Turns out they screwed that up when they pissed off the community and as a result have to recode most of the game and maybe even ditch the map they showed off. Because of this, EVERY SINGLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPER has forked the project. The new project can be found at this link.

http://www.xonotic.org/