Baker wrote:
1) Violating Valve's copyright.
2) Violating Valve's license agreement.
Are you serious? Have you even read Valves licence agreement? Reverse engineering is not copyright violation, and it is intellectually lazy to suggest otherwise. Nor did I propose violating Valves licence agreement. Asserting otherwise is ridiculous.
Valve released the SDK with the intention of encouraging modification of their software. Which is entirely what Xash3d is. A modification of their SDK, which requires a licensed version of Half-life to run. It contains code poached from Quake. That is it. The fact that they're blatantly breaking the GPL (the real issue here) is besides the point.
Their reply will be no.
They will not be spending $10,000 in legal fees to draft up a special agreement just for some random dude (they've never even heard of) that emails them.
Do you think Valve --- a company with untold TENS of million of unit sales and has been popular ever since Half Life in 1998 so that's 12 years --- you think they have never received such an email in the past?
Where are these projects that received such a special exemption or custom license?
Yes. There are projects that have received special exemptions. See
http://blackmesasource.com/, which strongly borrows (steals?) from Valves copyright. It happens all the time. This is the nature of community driven modifications and expansion packs. I'm not even arguing here in favor of the PSP port, which incidentally I consider completely mentally retarded. If there is a chance that Valve could consider Xash3d in violation -entirely upto Valves discretion at this point, they must contact Valve and officially receive a CND notice or otherwise. A simple email to Gabe Newell is all it takes.
If Valve OK's it, they should do a through code audit and gut all GPLed Quake code out.
Or, alternatively, if Valve takes the nay stance and does CND, the project should gut all SDK code from the engine, and exist as a reverse engineering job based on top of Quake. Entirely legal.
Unfortunately, it is likely that neither of these things will happen.