Originally posted by Seven
Almost every single work in Quake is the literal product of several hundred people. The Quake Retexture Project is an example.
Or the any engine project. DarkPlaces, FTEQW, DirectQ, FitzQuake, Qrack, ProQuake ... you name it.
DarkPlaces has 10+ years of coding in it. LordHavoc freely "gives away" his work. MoonDrunk freely "gives away" his work. I freely "give away" my work. MH freely "gives away" his work. Spike freely "gives away" his work. FrikaC (tools and compilers), Ben Jardrup (the map compile tools almost every uses) and Metlslime (FitzQuake) freely give away their work.
There is a video to Rubicon 2 on the home page. Metlslime released the QuakeC source and the map source under the GPL.
A lot of these more recent compilation releases have lots of different licenses and readmes in them, by people newer to Quake and with different backgrounds and such.
About 3 years ago, there was a skin maker who was very sensitive about his work and very concerned over his read me. Quake Reforged, on the other hand, wasn't so concerned about that. Neither was Rygel. Probably as a result, no one probably even knows what project I was referring to.
Quake is still around mostly because most of the community has historically been primarily interested in Quake, where other game communities tend to fight their own members to death.
I have some difficulty seeing how the creator of DarkPlaces, LordHavoc, is a very sharing kind of guy who believes in openness and has backed it up by word and deed and how some people who make works that specifically target that engine have their own lesser ideas on the subject.
The thoughts here are not obviously directed at you, Seven, but it is the kind of spirit that LordHavoc and most of the longer term members of the Quake community share that is the sole reason that Quake exists today.
I find it odd that projects that use DarkPlaces, QRP textures or Quake Reforged textures or Rygel's textures --- these are all very open projects --- would not have a similar philosophy.
People in the community never forget who makes stuff.
/One point of view