Vainamoinen: fronzelneekburm, burying conspiracy theory under conspiracy theory, claims that 3D Realms under Schreiber intended to finish the game free of charge and Randy Pitchford said no.
Yeah, I decided that this sentence...
Frederik Schreiber offer[ed] to prepare these builds for release for free as well as an additional offer to prepare the mod tools for the final version of the game for release for free
...could be interpreted in a variety of ways.
I chose to give Randy the benefit of the doubt and wrote that 3D Realms doesn't want Gearbox's money for preparing these builds for public consumption when they probably meant that they doesn't want Gearbox's money AND want to release these builds to everyone for free (just as they have done before with Shadow Warrior). So, ironically, I'm getting flak for portraying Randy as a lesser asshole than he actually is.
Vainamoinen: In other words, yes, this was all about
funding, i.e. giving money to Schreiber to finish this version of the game, which Pitchford says isn't their business practice, yet
he'd actually be happy giving out the license should Schreiber succeed in his proposal
to the actually responsible person for such licensing deals.
You backed that up by posting the following Randy-tweet:
"Cannot fund you, you know that – not our business. Happy for you to have best-in-class license deal. Make proposal to Steve. Not my court." Turns out that this tweet you referred to had nothing whatsoever to do with the Duke Forever builds. Here's what TonyTiger has to say regarding this tweet:
The author claims that Gearbox Software offered them a licence for Duke Nukem Forever...this isn't true...those Tweets are from a completely unrelated discussion about Slipgate Studios possibly being granted a licence to do a Duke Nukem platformer if Rad Rodgers was received well, it was so they did but couldn't offer funding.
On a more personal note:
Vainamoinen: Gamers shouldn't sink so low as to post horrifyingly badly researched shit from the rpgcodex forums, invent their own crap on top of it, then take pride in having incited outrage based on no foundation at all and directed it against single persons in the gaming industry. This all reeks like gamergate-type internet detectivism, where the smear is the final goal and the truth just an inconvenient detail.
To spell it out for you: The goal isn't to make people think that Randy Pitchford is an asshole - because everyone knows that already. My final goal here, with this thread, is to spread enough awareness about the rather mind-blowing revelation of there actually being early builds of DNF that Gearbox will eventually give in and offer 3D Realms a way to actually release these builds.
Thankfully, the story is already getting some traction, so hopefully we'll be able to play 2001 DNF sooner rather than later.