This was done to clean up the license and to ensure that any commercial fork of the engine has to obey the far stricter requirements concerning source distribution. The old license was compatible with GPLv2 whereas combining GPLv2 and LGPLv3 force a license upgrade to GPLv3. The license of code that originates from ZDoomGL has not been changed.
After thinking about it for a day or so I believe it's the best option to remove all compatibility code because it's a major obstacle for a transition to a core profile.
- removed gl_vid_compatibility. With the bump to 1.4 no hardware requiring this flag is supported anymore.
- disabled 16 bit framebuffers for the same reason. As a conseqence all code for rendering without stencil could also be removed.