The Armadillo Aerospace Website is now host of new John Carmack .plan file / blog updates. The id Software programmer hadn't posted a new .plan since early 2003, but he plans on resuming them in the form of a blog while talking about various topics - "some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks". In this first new update he mentions he had planned to release the Quake 3 source code late 2004, something which obviously didn't happen.

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. 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.