Slashdot points out a thread on the Halflife2.net Forums suggesting that the recent release of older id Software games over Steam (story) may be a violation of the GNU GPL (thanks Ant). At issue is the inclusion of what may be a modified version of the DOSBox x86 emulator without attribution. Since this discussion started, relevant text files have been added to this Steam distribution, indicating efforts were already undertaken to address this over the weekend. A subsequent post by one of the DOSBox authors tries to quell the ire some are expressing over this. It should be pointed out that the second part of the comment is a bit off-base, since id has already made the free GPL releases of DOOM (story), Quake (story), Quake II (story), and Quake III Arena (story):

Can you people just calm down already. It's been like what 1 or 2 days after this thing has been released and people are already bitching about legal action or damage payments. It's not like we're losing money or whatever, it's euhm free software. There's lot's of open source programs being used for commercial ends. Sure it's nice to be mentioned somewhere but even then there's no obligation to do so. GPL violations can easily be sorted out in time if they just add or remove the necessary files.

On a different note you could of course wonder why ID is still milking their age old dos games, might give the fans something for free after all this time. But okay that's their right to do so.