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Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever

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473 points chocmake | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 03:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.605s | source
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modeless ◴[20 Nov 24 05:32 UTC] No.42191063[source]▶
I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.

I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.

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1. Ralfp ◴[20 Nov 24 11:02 UTC] No.42192731[source]▶
The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-1/14084/6

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2. tempaccount420 ◴[20 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42194881[source]▶
Why clean up first? Could be devs pushing back because they're ashamed (unnecessarily) of their code?
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3. cibyr ◴[20 Nov 24 23:55 UTC] No.42199466[source]▶
We saw with Winamp how badly it can go (lots of license violations on vendored dependencies):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/winamp-really-whips-...

4. account42 ◴[21 Nov 24 10:25 UTC] No.42202825[source]▶
Cleaning up in this context means figuring out what parts of the code they actually own and removing/replacing the parts they don't.