Quake 3 GPL'ed within a week

"John Carmack has confirmed that the Quake 3 engine will be released under the GPL in a matter of 7 days. The announcement was made at the 2005 QuakeCon."

I've got nothing but respect for Carmack, even though he's an egomaniac genius snob. (To wit, see the first sentences in this blog entry: "To a first approximation, I don’t really like talking to most people...")He has that in common with Steve Jobs, so how can I throw stones? The trend of GPLing old games warms the cockleburrs of my heart, because the coder and mod community is getting so good with this stuff that it's exciting to think what they could do to professional-quality code like Quake 3.

I'm also a fan of Carmack because of Armadillo Aerospace, his X-Prize inspired team that's building a rocket to carry people into space. The weekly progress reports are almost too dense to follow, but that hasn't stopped me from visiting the site on and off for a couple of years now. The bottom line is that they've been working diligently for years building this system from scratch, and the ingenuity involved and progress made is truly impressive. Good movies of their flights on their site, too.

Carmack is a Force for Good, and the dude is the last word in graphics engines and new GPU chipsets, too. Not bad.

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