Joseph Carter wrote:
> Kevin Pulo wrote:
>> I have written an essay which takes a blow by blow
>> account of how the Quake Lives release has violated
>> the GPL, providing specifics on where it's gone
>> wrong. Read it at
>
> That's good, I hope you have provided a solution or
> two to the situation?

Well, in terms of the GPL violation, I don't really know. I'm responding the best way I know how, which is by writing down reasons and trying to educate people. But I don't know what can be done in a legal sense - I'm no lawyer.

However, I really do think that the QWF can solve the QW cheating problem while staying fully GPLed. It uses public key encryption to do it.

> Clearly they're NOT going to
> produce the source to their proxy without a lawsuit.

They claim that they've spoken to iD and VA Linux about it, and both firms concur with them. I won't believe that until I see email from one of those firms.

Also, I have spoken to Slade, and he's not such a bad guy, he just seemed to be under the belief that the solution had to be closed, and could be implemented as it is now. But I wouldn't be surprised if he retracted the release and fixed it.

I can understand that iD may not care about the GPL violation, but I htink that they would probably want to defend the trademark.

> Which is fine, all they have to do is extract it
> from the quake source and build it using a socket or
> DDE or whatever the hell windoze uses (since that's
> all they seem to care about anyway..)

They don't like that idea, because then the socket interface could be hacked for cheating. And they're right, it would be a bad weak link, which confirms what I've said all along. A closed program can only offer security if it's the client itself, but that can never happen because of the GPL. You could write a DLL that links in at runtime, but then a dummy DLL can be written to discover the interface. You could write a proxy, but it's comms can also be hacked. The best solution is a fully open source client using public/private keys to verify binaries, which is what QWF is implementing.

Kev.