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As was reported earlier this week, id Software has open-sourced Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Opening up these older games under the GNU GPL was done as part of id's long-standing tradition of putting out the code into the public domain once it makes sense for them a few years after their succeeding engine updates have fully replaced them in the marketplace. The developers behind ioquake3, the project that's based around the Quake 3 engine that was previously opened up by id Software, is already working on iowolfet and iortcw forks to incorporate this new code, but other free software developers are already utilizing this code too.
Sometimes Mr. Larabel is on the mark, and sometimes he's a bit... fuzzy on credibility. But this is inexcusable, as it has been hammered from all directions. The GPLvX, for any value of X, means the original author(s) retain their copyrights. Free/Open Source Software is not the same as Public Domain!
Really, there's no excuse today for such ignorance.
True, GPL is not Public Domain. Never has been. However, the various FOSS licenses have taken on much of the role that PD used to fulfill. These licenses grant mere mortals the the kind of access to works they previously could only obtain from PD sources. The sad state of affairs around the current copyright duration has severely eroded the Public Domain. Doesn't take away the fact that mixing FOSS up with PD is sloppy.
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Really, there's no excuse today for such ignorance.