Freely licensed PWADs?

[Cire]

Are there any freely licensed PWADs availible?

[Mithran Denizen]

That depends on what you mean by "freely licensed", I guess. The idgames archive holds a lot of PWADs that grant reuse/modification and distribution in their text files, but I can't recall seeing many that rigorously set themselves out with any kind of traditional 'free' licensing scheme like the GPL or Creative Commons licenses.

I'm not sure how well the goofy wording in the standard text file template would stand up in court as a valid license, but I doubt we'll ever have to find out.

[Cire]

I can't remember seeing any WAD licensed by any traditional free license in the idgames archive. Is there any at all?

[Mithran Denizen]

With a search for 'GPL' in the text files, I came up with a handful of levels that list the GNU GPL as their license. I had to wade through a few pages of engines and utilities, but I found a handful:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=11091
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=12922
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=9973 (sort of)
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=12925

(Watch out though; Chris Wright's sad offerings show up in a search for 'GPL' too, because they have "agplan.wad" in the text. I wouldn't feel right if I encouraged you to check those out. :P )


Doing a full text search for "Creative Commons" or "BSD" or similar might give you some more, but I didn't check.

[edit: Now I did. 'BSD' seems to give one map, by Catoptromancy:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15847

I can't find anything under the Creative Commons licenses, but I didn't look all that hard. 'MIT' brings up >2000 results, but I somehow doubt that any of them are relevant to the license. Nothing relevant for 'Artistic License' or the WTFPL either.]

[edit2: Heh, I didn't see hex11's post while I was editing. Also, I'd assume the OP knows about Freedoom, since this is the Freedoom subforum.]

[hex11]

There's Freedoom, although that's really a set of IWADs, but I guess you could extract the maps and run them as PWADs also.

This one has BSD licence:
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15847

[printz]

What does this have to do specifically with Freedoom? You should be able to play any WAD on /idgames by using Freedoom.

[Cire]

Mithran Denizen: Thanks for the suggestions. Yeah, I knew about Freedoom. ;) Also Blasphemer is probably worth mentioning.

printz: Yeah, this isn't directly related to Freedoom, but Freedoom is free software, and I was looking for other free software WADs, so I thought it's kind of related in way. I know it's possible to play all Doom/Doom II WADs with Freedoom. :)

[fraggle]

There's a couple of Freedoom-related ones that I've released:

• Leftover.wad
  
• bsdmidi
  

Because of the idgames template, a lot of WADs have permissions blurb like this (example):

Authors MAY use the contents of this file as a base for modification or
reuse.  Permissions have been obtained from original authors for any of
their resources modified or included in this file.

You MAY distribute this file, provided you include this text file, with no
modifications.  You may distribute this file in any electronic format (BBS,
Diskette, CD, etc) as long as you include this file intact.  I have
received permission from the original authors of any modified or included
content in this file to allow further distribution.

You might be able to make a case that this meets the criteria in the free software definition or the Open Source definition.

Compare with other licenses: the ISC license grants "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software". It certainly covers all of these. The only thing it doesn't explicitly state is that you can do it "for any purpose with or without fee".

Another example of a simple license is the WTFPL, which is recognized as a valid Free Software license. It states "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION: 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO". The above text certainly grants those three permissions.

[hex11]

Cire said:

Also Blasphemer is probably worth mentioning.

Blasphemer is a cool project with lots of potential, but it hardly has any maps at all right now. It needs tons of sprites too, and probably some textures and sounds.

And actually the maintainers are looking for someone else to take over the project, so it's probably not going to get very far anytime soon.

I'd try my hand at making maps for it, but I'm not very good yet. Right now I'm doing a new map for vanilla FreeDM IWAD (that too needs lots of maps).

[Grazza]

fraggle said:

Because of the idgames template, a lot of WADs have permissions blurb like this (example):
[...]
You might be able to make a case that this meets the criteria in the free software definition or the Open Source definition.

But one needs to be aware that in many cases when people use the template unaltered, they are making false statements - they have not obtained the permissions they are claiming to have done. So some detective work may still be needed, particularly in cases where the wad contains any resources in addition to the basic map data.

[Cire]

I would like to do maps or otherwise help the Freedoom/Blasphemer projects but have no experience of mapping or anything for id Tech 1 engine. Another project that could be considered in the future sometime would be Freehexen (or whatever it would be called). Some stuff could probably be reused from Blasphemer like Hexen reused stuff from Heretic (at least some items, maybe more stuff). First step would be to make a placeholder IWAD that contains the same set of data as Hexen. Then Hexen PWADs could be used with it. I've no idea how to achieve that though. It might be a bad idea to start work on it though as it might be better get the IWADs we already have more complete first.

[fraggle]

Grazza said:

But one needs to be aware that in many cases when people use the template unaltered, they are making false statements - they have not obtained the permissions they are claiming to have done. So some detective work may still be needed, particularly in cases where the wad contains any resources in addition to the basic map data.

Definitely, and the exact thought already occurred to me. I suspect the biggest problem is with textures, sprites or other graphics that have been derived from the original Doom ones. If it's a WAD containing just levels it can probably be assumed to be clean.