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!
This is great news! Thanks for the heads up!
I was planning to buy the bundle, but didn’t because they were proprietary software (no freedom). I guess now that three of the games are open source I should take another look. I’m glad to see more video games becoming Free Software (or at least opensourced), I hope this is a lasting trend.
Free Software or Open Source doesn’t mean you can’t make or sell software for a living, it just means that you respect your users while doing so. I think what we have been seeing lately shows this well.
However, with the increasing number of Free Software gaming choices, K3rnel has got some real competition. Best of luck!
It’s actually 4 games that are becoming FOSS, not just 3. (At this very instant, only one of them is open, but they said the rest of the code will be coming throughout the week).
These indie devs definitely respect their users. They might not be handing the code for World of Goo, for instance, but they respect their users enough to no inconvenience them with DRM.
A quote straight from their devs:
“When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.”. Straight from their blog: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny—-pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle
Competition is good. Competition is awesome. And what these guys are doing is reminding us that there can definitely be a business with open source.
Oh, and it wasn’t the first time they’ve OpenSourced something. Black Shades was open sourced quite a while back!
http://icculus.org/blackshades/
Oh, and it wasn’t the first time they’ve OpenSourced something. Black Shades was open sourced quite a while back!
http://icculus.org/blackshades/