Sad. I guess when they told us the Zenimax deal didn't affect their independence in any way they were "forgetting" some details. So, probably no more Linux ports, no more GPLing of older engines. I guess they gave the control to the suits. The reasoning doesn't sound very solid either, it's assuming that the only reason for anyone ever to run linux is that all of it is free software. I don't disagree with that being a very good reason but it's definitely not the only one. The same poor argument could be used for not doing a Mac port. And I thought anyone trying to run cutting edge games on Linux had to use the Nvidia driver anyway, Doom 3 didn't work too well on ATI when it came out anyway, did it?

I feel you missed my point. I was only arguing that your decisions should not only be based on what you can get away with when closely scrutinizing a law, license or a contract but that you should also consider what's ethical. Laws are usually (if they're any good) based on a moral code. Licenses and contracts try to reflect the wishes of the people who write them.

  I am fully aware of the contents of the GPL and as someone said the spirit of the GPL can only be defined by the FSF so if you want to look past the legalese you look to what they are saying and they're saying selling GPLed software is okay. They probably wouldn't like doing it through the App Store though.

Personally I'm all for the GPL as meant to be read by the FSF but in a situation such as the one we are discussing where the authors have used the GPL but have not themselves written it so their understanding of it's spirit may have been wrong you're going to have to take into consideration what their understanding of the spirit in which they were giving you access to the code was also if you want to do the right thing instead of just the legal thing.

Unless your ethical view is that the author is not really supposed to have the kind of control granted by copyright law over their work in the first place so their opinion is not so important at this point. A valid way of looking at it as well but one that depends on ethics rather than just doing anything you can legally get away with.

So if you find a loophole in the law that lets you get away with murder you'd have no problem doing it? There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the people licensing you the software even if they've not been able to craft a perfect, no-loopholes legal document to describe them.

Never mind Freenet for this, you could use I2P which also features in-network Bittorrent. Of course if you really want to only share the torrents with an anonymising network you'll need to do modifications but at least it'll be easier when you can use existing tracker software. TOR's hidden services would work as well I suppose.

Just hosting the tracker on one of these networks is an interesting idea. It wouldn't provide any protection for the downloaders and seeders themselves but if people aren't quite ready to sacrifice download speeds at least it would shift the attention back to the people downloading again if the indexing sites/trackers were impossible to attack. It would be a step in the right direction. I can see why no-one has done this so far though.