End of story.
Linux gaming is a niche idea for a niche OS (-Linux on desktops for the masses. I know Linux in the enterprise is big). Microsoft isn't losing any sleep over the idea of Linux gaming going mainstream.
Rephrase ; the authors of GPL v2 overlooked the practice of tivoization because at the time of writing, it was unknown.
Right, so you can't very well put the cost of making GPL v3 on the shoulders of Tivo as you tried to do with the statement, "Once Tivo Inc. showed GNU just how evil a corporation can be, they had to spend time and money creating GPLv3, time and money that could have been spent actually doing something, instead had to be spent on lawyering." Tivo did what was allowed. The FSF got upset. The FSF then spent money and time drafting a license that covers the problem they didn't foresee. Like the original respondent to your post said, If the FSF wants to limit the way software using their license is used it is their responsibility to review and update their license to disallow the things they want to restrict. "Spirit of the law" is a nice sounding term but it has no bearing on a license. If the license does not stipulate what cannot be done with whatever it covers then it is perfectly legal to do that thing. Tivo had better lawyers than the FSF, end of story.
Put blame where blame is due. It's the code Bethesda/Obsidian wrote, not the code that they purchased from Emergent.
I doubt if there is anyone left who thinks that offers of v1gra and riches from Nigerian princes are real opportunities.
Do you just have a feeling that people stopped being stupid or can you cite a specific date and time you saw the majority of humanity show some shred of intellect over greed?
Now, one way this may work is if they sell the engine much cheaper than Unreal (currently around $1m/sku). If you can get 5 for a lot less than that and give Bethesda the going publisher take on a shipped title (50% of revenue...thats probably a bit conservative). Then the engine choice might start to make sense for some 3rd party studios. But at $1m/sku *AND* giving Bethesda a % of revenue?....no way, no how.
I think the adoption of 5 will be very similar to that of idtech 4. Id games will use it, naturally, and those studios that exist by making id IP games, Raven, Grey Matter, Splash Damage, and Human Head, will use it as they make more id IP games. Some other independent studios may try it. But, for the most part, it will be an internal Bethesda technology.
Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.
Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.
Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.
The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off. -- Bill Conrad