If you could add one thing to Vanilla Doom

[myk]

Graf Zahl said:
But such half-assed and selective handling of copyright does not make your standpoint any more valid.

Personally, I am rather a purist in regard to copyrights. On my (unfinished) project, I avoid using other people's or company's stuff without their permission, and I always suggest others do the same: see PL2 and various discussions regarding projects on the forums.

The archive seems to me like a decent compromise, given the circumstances. Always respect what authors, who are directly involved in the community, say about the works of theirs that are hosted on it, and always be responsive to any companies making any complaints. Copyrights are respected on both grounds, but the mechanism by which this happens is distinct because the circumstances are different.

It's funny that, since you failed to successfully accuse me of being an unrelenting copyright zealot, you'll instead throw the hypocrite title at me without looking at the facts. A hypocrite is someone who fails to apply on himself what he demands of others. That is certainly not what I am in regard to this topic. I apply it to myself, suggest it to others, but I don't try to force it unconditionally on them.

It's a hollow ideal that protects exactly the wrong things in any conceivable way.

It's very practical. Without protecting each other's work by respecting each other's word, creative people end up tired and dissatisfied from the discredit of a mish-mashing community that takes people's work for granted, and, little by little, they leave.

TheeXile said:
Normally I'd be more about keeping the copyright and asking people with problems with the old stuff to focus instead on making new and better stuff then (if the original authors don't/won't give permissions, I mean), but that's not really how creative communities work, isn't it?

In part it's about sharing and in part about having a space where one can be distinctive or creative. That's why willing sharing is important. When it turns compulsive, with people doing with your files whatever they want regardless of what you said, the community suffers.

Keep in mind that these files we're discussing are indeed antiques or arcane DOOM stuff that will mainly interest those with retro tendencies. If some guy just ripe out of a Halo 8 game can't run them, it's not the end of the world. Said guy will likely conclude they're a piece of crap if he manages, anyway. Besides, just ranting about how hard installing them is, as some people did above, instead of explaining how to get them running is going to help drive them away. There's still an innumerable amount of stuff we, and the newer players that are less interested in old DOS games, can play, so we don't even need to fix these particular files. Hence, we can easily refrain from doing so simply because we didn't hear the okay from the author.