Any malicious server could just ignore a client-setting and send non-free content anyways. The client on the other hand either has to trust the server on file checksums or download and checksum the file and then deny loading it into the game.
Also if the server would be evily modified to sent everything anyway, one may add the check also in the client, that would download the package, and then discard it if reports missing or incomplete license infos.
Anyway, someone with "malicious" intents (who may want to do that? Someone who wants you to download that package against your will... maybe to be sure his mod will work? I don't know.) would not need to modify server binaries to send you his "evil" package anyway... simply writing
false informations into the licensing file would be enough.
I don't know how likely is this to happen or not.
Gig's idea does not really work with already existing pk3 files (think of Quake 3 maps), since they do not have the proper files included.
Yes, we already said that (this is the main reason I would
not enable a such thing by default. Otherwise, maybe it may even fall under
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/NOTTODO]NOTTODO, as an obstacle for Q3 mod compatibility, which is a main goal for OA).
However, I don't know how much this feature that would be actually used:
- Many people do not take in account copyright issues too seriously (maybe this is not good, but it is)... how many will enable it?
- Home-made mods and maps usually, also if not open source, are meant to be used by everyone at no charge. So you are doing nothing bad playing them. I'm unsure about the legal status of such things.
- It would prevent players from connecting to many servers, or would make servers much less "varied" if limited to use such stuff only.