Monthly Archives: May 2010

Indie Games go Open Source!

So Wolfire Games decided to make this neat “Humble Indie Bundle” that included four games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish and Lugaru HD), and had a “pay what you want” model, and let you donate to either the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation (Which we encourage you to!) or Child’s Play (Or none, if you’d rather have the money go to the devs.)

As if that wasn’t amazing enough, the bundle is completely DRM Free, and the games are fully playable under Linux, Mac or that other OS. And if four games seemed like to little, they later added 2 more games: Penumbra: Overture and Samorost 2.

Then, Steve Swink tweeted… “If we raise over $1,000,000 USD then Gish, Penumbra Overture and Lugaru will release their source code!”. And so, after raising over $1,000,000 USD, Lugaru HD’s source is open, with the others “opening soon”.

While the game’s engines are fully open, resources and other things aren’t, and each will carry its own license, too. For instance, in Lugaru’s case. You’re free to use the game’s art, as long as you don’t profit from said art.

Remember, you can still donate towards the “Humble Indie Bundle” (And we encourage you to! All the cool kids are doing it!) and get your pack of 6 games, 4 of which will be Open Sourced, and will work on 3 major platforms. What are you waiting for? Get the bundle!

Winch Gate <3′s Open Source!

Ryzom is a commercial Sci-Fi MMORPG, developed exclusively for Windows by Winch Gate.

Well, it was, anyway. The Free Software Foundation talked them into releasing the source code for both the client *and* the server, under the GNU Aferro GPL v3 (Which, in layman’s term’s means that projects that use and modify Ryzom source code will be required to share those improvements with others.), as well as all their art and character models under the CC-BY-SA license. The only things they’re not releasing are audio assets (Due to the unknown copyright nature), as well as the level and world data (their storyline).

Now Ryzom will also be available for Linux and Macs. The code (Developed in c++) is fully available to study and use. Over Two-Million lines of code, and over 20,000 high quality textures, and thousands of 3D game objects

Now, you might be wondering what Ryzom has anything to do with the K3RNEL Project?
Well, it just proved that commercial projects *can* be Free and Open Sourced Software, and we just got us one hell of a competitor in the area.

Denied

So, we just had our ad account blocked due to someone(or a group of someones? I don’t know. Google won’t tell me) clicking one too many ads.

Google had over 50,000 free ads on the site, and they did not pay a single cent for them. Freeloaders.