Yes it is. Wolfenstein ET has become open sourced yesterday. The gpl'ed source is in ID's ftp right now
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/ET-GPL.zip - ET
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/RTCW-MP-GPL.zip - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Multiplayer)
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/RTCW-SP-GPL.zip - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Single Player)

This is amazing, I never expected to see this happen but it has. Thank you very much Carmack.

OMFG

I dkid read some roumors last year, but I never thougth this would happen!

simply awesome

So what does this mean for TCE players?
No hardcoded shit anymore?
It is legal to pack TCE and ET in same downloadable file?
What else?

Doesnt change that much for TCE apart it might open more abilities to Coroner ; but this is good news to all moders that will have more infos about the game itself.
At least this is how i see the thing.

It's GNU GPL so it needs all derivative works to be GNU GPL too :p

There are many things that can happen now:
- you can now make a standalone game (no need to pack ET with TC:E as that's still against the EULA)
- upgrade various parts of the engine (including but not limited to: physics, graphics and etc.)
This also can mean some not so good things might happen. I may be jsut speculating here but when Q3 was GPL'ed, PB dropped their support for it. Whether this will happen to ET/RTCW, I dunno. We'll have to see in the coming weeks/months/years.

Short term news is probably moot, as there are as many limitations as there are benefits to how id Software delivers source; long term were Coroner say to Open Source a game like True Combat: Elite, it could mean a lot.

Limitations

The GPL License

Currently all TC:E and CQB work can bey copyright, closed source and prospectively repurposed in some commercial work on some other engine, like our Moose Engine which will ship with a modified MIT License for mod Developers. On ET Source, TC:E or CQB would eventually have to be FOSS games...

Assets Not Included

id Tech engine source is typically engine only source, which eliminates all art assets and often a lot of game-function top-code that TC:E, CQB may rely on. A cursory look at the ET source shows it includes a surprising number of features, but there's a lot that isn't there that will be tedious and time consuming even for a capable and ambitious team with a lot of free time to code/create.

No Support

While W:ET is functionally at EOL, it and its Mods still benefit from: Master Servers and Punk Buster, and though Punk Buster has it's license EOL, it still protects in it's final resting state against a bevy of annoying cheats and exploits that would run amok on an FOSS game.

Benefits

Short Term

Coroner gets access to source that may help him address more design and functional issues -- which may add more time then planned, and slow CQB development to some extent, but help deliver a better game more along the lines of his design intentions and goals.

Long Term

Obviously True Combat, and True Combat: Elite could never have happened were it not for id Software's generous mod support, and source policy; with that in mind it wouldn't seem unreasonable at some future date that TC, TC:E or even CQB would be released as an FOSS game(s), returning benefit in kind, establishing long term good will and recognition for all the design precedents TC set for gaming rather then ending up at the bottom of the heap of mod oblivion and forgotten mods.

Of course Coroner is still actively developing id Tech engine mods, so it's unlikely the news will have any immediately perceivable benefit in 'Gamer Land'...

The best part of all this is that we will be able to apply some patches directly instead of to patch the executable or add some server-side tricks for weaponstats for example (but we still need some as they are introduced by TC:E itself).
On the other hand, it will help cheaters, but anyway hackers have reversed it for a lot of time
Another good thing is that we will be able to add some nice features like direct insertion of GMScriptMod and maybe Unicode/UTF-8 support!!!
And about the models of the players they could have already been changed (see the page of ikanatto) (I have put for a long time manga characters on the Panzerwar server)
This will be a good week-end

Thanks John Carmack!

That's (expected) good news. For CQB this will mainly mean that there is at least the perspective of a future update path for the engine. It also ultimately means that technology wise CQB can exist for many more years on ET engine.
At the very moment, it doesn't mean much and everything continuous according to the old goals. For hacking reasons, I will keep CQB closed source and, as such as a mod of the free game ET under the ET EULA. Of course, it is possible to run that free game with a patched or modified engine based on GNU GPL ET engine, like UrT does with ioUrbanTerror.
Standalone is not possible at the moment because the ET player models are used or derivative work of those models. I could speculate, however, that it might be possible to find some deal to use them for free in a standalone but non-commercial game.

Kickass!!! Now we can finaly have old dynamic lighting back !!!

Im... Im so happy

Please Coroner not that shit, we need punkbuster as a protection (PB + streaming to PbBans is the best solution we can get).

Appendix
On the another ikanatto's blog(Only japanese, but you can see some images of models for ET), you can get mdm converter.(mds or mqo to md3 or mdm)
(About how to use, read mdtool.cfg in zip)
(mqo is an extention of 3d model editor "metasequoia" which is the most famous free tool in japan)

However it has some bugs and I dont know whether it can export mdx or not.(I have never used it)
I think we should use other tool like lightray3D.

A guy on SD made Q3 model which allows to convert to mdm/mdx much easier and less hackish-like. I've been meaning to get around to scripting that mdm/mdx exporter for Blender.

Does this mean bump maps could be implemented in CQB?

Yes as it means same for dynamic lighting and dynamic shadows also a pixel shader 3 is possible.

But to be honest i only miss dynamic lighting not dynamic shadows, pixel shader or bumpy.

This dont mean that we have every shit in the game since main objective of true combat series is not to make fully graphicaly extended game. I like more retro and year 2000-2003 graphics

Well i have feeling that now when coroner have free hands he might want to mess around with some cool stuff with lighting and shadow effects since its somewhat hes one of goals as he said that he tried to go more into True combat's darker theme :O

And i think it will be a lot easier to further develope CQB. (lol as coroner stated that it dont have much impact on current development now ofcourse we dont know these cool people named developers which always inclued some unexeptable stuff in the game )