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

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by micah, Feb 27, 2012.

  1. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    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!
     
  2. lolzappan

    lolzappan Well-Known Member

    Feb 7, 2012
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    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.
     
  3. TheBunny

    TheBunny Well-Known Member

    Nov 8, 2008
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    MMO Mac Lead ZeniMax Online
    Baltimore
    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.
     
  4. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
    362
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    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.
     
  5. racingspider

    racingspider Well-Known Member

    I think you're on the right track with the license option. Great for learning.
     
  6. 99c_gamer

    99c_gamer Well-Known Member

    Mar 23, 2009
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    cool going to check out Skeleton Key
     
  7. 99c_gamer

    99c_gamer Well-Known Member

    Mar 23, 2009
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    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.
     
  8. Ebenezer18

    Ebenezer18 Member

    Feb 26, 2012
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    [​IMG]It is not useable in any kind of commercial app.
     
  9. lolzappan

    lolzappan Well-Known Member

    Feb 7, 2012
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    http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/31/grab-your-ios-version-of-vlc-now-it-may-be-gone-soon/

    and from the developers

    http://applidium.com/en/news/apple_pulled_vlc_off_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. :confused: 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.
     

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