Insurgent Games Makes All Games Free, Releases Everything as Open Source

[micah]

Hey developers! I haven't posted in here in forever but I used to be a regular. I'm the developer for Insurgent Games which is now fairly dormant. I now have a separate full-time job that provides much more stable income, and other interesting programming/hacking challenges.

So we just decided to make all of our games free and open source (GPLv3)! Here's our announcement about it: http://www.insurgentgames.com/open-source/

All of the code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/insurgentgames

While I don't plan on updating any of these anytime soon, if anyone else wants to patches are totally welcome. I hope that maybe newbie programmers can use these projects to better learn how to develop games.

It's also important to note that none of them have been updated for some time. They use a variety of technologies (cocos2d in Objective C, Marmelade SDK in C++, GameSalad), and since those projects have been updated a lot since I've updated the games they might not compile without a bit of tinkering.

I also have a couple of started-but-never-finished projects that I could throw up on Github if there's any interest.

Anyway, I hope the game development community enjoys these! And let me know if you decide to fork them!

[lolzappan]

Originally Posted by micah

Hey developers! I haven't posted in here in forever but I used to be a regular. I'm the developer for Insurgent Games which is now fairly dormant. I now have a separate full-time job that provides much more stable income, and other interesting programming/hacking challenges.

So we just decided to make all of our games free and open source (GPLv3)! Here's our announcement about it: http://www.insurgentgames.com/open-source/

All of the code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/insurgentgames

While I don't plan on updating any of these anytime soon, if anyone else wants to patches are totally welcome. I hope that maybe newbie programmers can use these projects to better learn how to develop games.

It's also important to note that none of them have been updated for some time. They use a variety of technologies (cocos2d in Objective C, Marmelade SDK in C++, GameSalad), and since those projects have been updated a lot since I've updated the games they might not compile without a bit of tinkering.

I also have a couple of started-but-never-finished projects that I could throw up on Github if there's any interest.

Anyway, I hope the game development community enjoys these! And let me know if you decide to fork them!

That is really great but maybe you should consider something other than GPLv3 as I understand, GPL is incompatible with Apple appstore and they have taken down GPL based apps before.

[TheBunny]

Originally Posted by lolzappan

That is really great but maybe you should consider something other than GPLv3 as I understand, GPL is incompatible with Apple appstore and they have taken down GPL based apps before.

GPL3 is a non sane license please change.
It is not useable in any kind of commercial app.

Please change to an actual free license like MIT or ZLIB.

[micah]

Originally Posted by lolzappan

That is really great but maybe you should consider something other than GPLv3 as I understand, GPL is incompatible with Apple appstore and they have taken down GPL based apps before.

Oh yeah? I think I might have heard about this when it was happening. Do you have any articles about it?

And TheBunny, you're allowed to use GPL in commercial apps as long as those apps are also open source under a similar license. Obviously this is a big disincentive for people to re-use my code unless they're already planning on releasing open source apps, which very few people are.

On the other hand, the benefits to GPL are obvious. I'm a big supporter of open source software, and restrictive licenses like GPL mean that any derivitive work must be released under a similar license. This way there's a chance there will be more open source iOS and Android games out there, which would be is a huge benefit to everyone, especially new programmers trying to figure out how to write games with little amount of example games to look through, and hobbyists, and innovative people who want to try out new open business models.

I'll wait awhile and see what other feedback I get though. If no one is finding my code useful as a learning tool or to release more open source apps then I'm open to changing it to a permissive license.

[racingspider]

I think you're on the right track with the license option. Great for learning.

[99c_gamer]

cool going to check out Skeleton Key

[99c_gamer]

skeleton key is actually pretty cool. If you want to try making money on it You could probably put an add banner in there and it wouldnt' be too distracting.

[Ebenezer18]

It is not useable in any kind of commercial app.

[lolzappan]

Originally Posted by micah

Oh yeah? I think I might have heard about this when it was happening. Do you have any articles about it?

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/31/grab-...-be-gone-soon/

and from the developers

http://applidium.com/en/news/apple_p..._the_appstore/

Although in this case it seems that it wasn't Apple but other developers who basically argued that GPL was incompatible and Apple somehow sided with that. Very odd.

The situation being that if you have GPL code and if someone says, you used GPL code, it's not compatible Apple seems to side with the complainant rather than the developer. The argument that seems missing though is that GPL and the appstore rules being open vs. closed is at its core incompatible.