John Carmack博客文章的翻译（二）

Quake 3 Source  

Quake 3 源代码

 

I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn’t the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I’m pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.

 

我打算在2004年底发布雷神之锤在GPL下的源代码，但是我们有另外一个大型技术许可需要通过审查，而且在公司花了几十万块钱去买了许可的完整权限后几个月公布代码可能会造成很差的效果。当然，在GPL许可下公开和拥有免费的皇室权利而没有公开代码的需要是不一样的，但是我很肯定那将会带来很不好的感觉。

 

Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won’t be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won’t wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

 

先前的代码公开是直到最后一个商业技术许可得到才举行的，但是在游戏引擎自然演化的今天，那样做是不明智的。在Half Life 2中仍然存在着一些Quake的早期代码，而Quake3剩余的技术许可单位将沿着类似的线路继续他们内部的开发，所以不可能存在跟以往一样的明显的截止日期。我依然致力于公开尽可能多的代码，我不会等到得到最后的技术许可，不过在我感觉到适合公开之前还是需要一段时间的。