While SETUP.EXE was written in C, the menus themselves were designed using a shareware program called "The Laughing Dog Screen Maker" by Yardbird Software. The source code to SETUP.EXE was released in 1996 by John Carmack, long before the release of the Doom source itself. In 2005, Simon "Fraggle" Howard contacted John Carmack, who agreed to relicensing of the source code under the GNU GPL.