CVG has an interview with John Carmack on Quake Live
"Imagine if somebody gave you a copy of the original Q3A," suggests id Software co-founder John Carmack, "and asked you to come play with them online. You'd have to install it, download the latest patch, figure out what mods people are playing, figure out how to find the servers - that whole long rigmarole that the game conventionally requires. The whole point of Quake Live is to bypass all of that."
and a bit on mods in Quake Live
How will mods work with Quake Live?
JC:The answer is that, in the classic mod sense of being able to hack whatever you want, they don't. We've incorporated a lot of the things that have been popular in mods, we're working with mod teams on there, but it is essentially a controlled system. We're in no way shutting down the original Q3A scene, so anybody who wants to build things with the open-source code is still more than free to do so. That may even become a proving ground for moving things into Quake Live.
Check out the article....
Link:
Interview: John Carmack - ComputerAndVideoGames.com