Sell Q2 mods?

[Mikemc]

Is it ok to sell a stand-alone mod designed with the Quake 2 engine? I just bought a game called "Emazing Mazes" by egames and not only does the 3D mazes folder contain a folder called 'baseq2' but I can edit everything inside as well as load each maze into QuArK - and they use Q2's entities aswell!

... Hmm... maybe I should enter one of their mazes into the mapping contest

*Edit*
I did some poking around Id's Exploitation Agreement and maybe I'm not chewing properly but I didn't find it very "Easy to digest" . It mentions pay-per-play but is selling through Radio Shack (The Source) ok in the end? Suppose those eGames people are paying royalties? I don't consider them that kind of company...

- Mike

[Whirlingdervish]

Well, as long as the game doesn't use any of the resources packaged with the full version of quake 2 it should technically be beyond Id's control in a legal sense..

Once they released the source code for the game engine, under a public license, the quake 2 engine itself became freeware..

I don't know that you are allowed to use something released under a public license for personal gain though. I'm not exactly sure that you can legally charge people for something based on someone else's open source code.. I think you're forced to release it under the same "public" license.
(by this I mean once it's open source, whatever you make with it must be too..)

I could be wrong though, I think I remember something in the GPL that states you are allowed to charge a fee for the work that you create from the original GPL licensed code, but you have to extend the same rights to the person who bought it that you have..

here's a link to the license agreement text:
www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

you might find more answers in there..

[Paril]

Quake2 is GPL. You can't sell the engine with a mod without buying a seperate license from them. Check their Legal section.

-Paril