In a presentation that lasted well over an hour, streamed live for free at the official website, quakecon.org, Carmack rambled over a dozen different topics, covering development on next-generation platforms and the viability of physics processors, but the highlight for us PC kids was probably when he mentioned, almost as an aside, that Quake III source was going to be freely available in a week or less. The motivation appeared to stem from his recent experience with cell phone game development, where a product could be created from stem to stern inside of one man-year of time (as opposed to the hundred or more man-years it takes for a triple-A PC title).More details at IGN
Quake III source code to be released next week

One of the surprises of John Carmack's speech at QuakeCon this year was the announcement that the Quake III source code will be released for free under the GPL license next week. It will be made available on the FTP site of id Software.