Recently, game developer King transferred the source code for the Defold game engine over to a new Defold Foundation where they opened up the source and now they have a new sponsor.
There was a bit of an issue with the initial source opening for Defold, as they initially claimed it was "open source" but their license was tweaked in a way that made it not OSI-approved, making it not open source. Now they've moved over to calling it "source available". With that sorted, they're moving onto bigger things.
Like other such projects, they allow the community to donate money to help development but they also take on corporate sponsors. King, the original copyright holder is currently a "Platinum" partner which provides them around $4,000 a month. Announced today is the inclusion of Heroic Labs as a "Gold" level partner, which should provide them a further $2,000 a month. From the press release:
“We are excited to welcome Heroic Labs as a Defold Foundation corporate partner. We share Heroic Labs passion for open source development and we support their goal to solve the pain points with cloud services and server development. The support for Nakama will make scalable social and multiplayer game development accessible to Defold developers,” said Defold Product Owner Björn Ritzl.
“The attention to detail and stability of the Defold engine has impressed us greatly. The team’s approach with their developer community is inspiring and we’re excited to support and share in their journey as open-source technology providers to the games market. We believe that when you pair our two great technologies together the results will be successful games loved by many”, said Heroic Labs Cofounder & CTO Andrei Mihu.
What interesting, as that Heroic Labs are also one of Godot Engine's sponsors. Part of their plan here is the same as Godot, to get Nakama, their open-source distributed server for social and real-time games and apps (think matchmaking, authentication, leaderboards and so on) supported fully with Defold.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
"...as they initially claimed it was "open source" but their license was tweaked in a way that made it not OSI-approved open source"You read far too much into my wording there. I wasn't claiming it was still open source. I've adjusted the wording to be even clearer on that.
Can't agree to that. The term open-source was invented by OSI. There is no such thing as "Not Open Source Initiative-approved open source"..
So I will continue to call that type of licence "Open Farce".I also find that entirely unhelpful, unproductive and just silly.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 26 May 2020 at 11:51 am UTC
According to comments in this HN article (which I didn't vet because come on...): The source owner for defold inappropriately used the term 'open source' and later corrected it apologizing for the confusion in wording. It's really on them for initially causing the confusion. It was a mistake on their part and they apologized. Here is the HN article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232648 and this is the actual comment claiming responsibility for the mistake (calling it 'open source'): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235217"...as they initially claimed it was "open source" but their license was tweaked in a way that made it not OSI-approved open source"You read far too much into my wording there. I wasn't claiming it was still open source. I've adjusted the wording to be even clearer on that.
Can't agree to that. The term open-source was invented by OSI. There is no such thing as "Not Open Source Initiative-approved open source"..
So I will continue to call that type of licence "Open Farce".I also find that entirely unhelpful, unproductive and just silly.
In my opinion FOSS supporters don't realize how little 'the rest of the world' knows about software licensing, permissive open source, and FOSS/copy-left open source. The OSI has not done a great job educating and providing clarity. I'll venture to guess that many software developers and Linux users don't understand the difference and implications between 'open source' and FOSS/copy-left open source. My point is, let's be understanding and not condescending and judgemental about mistakes or misunderstandings. Most of us are still on a learning journey.
In my opinion FOSS supporters don't realize how little 'the rest of the world' knows about software licensing, permissive open source, and FOSS/copy-left open source. The OSI has not done a great job educating and providing clarity. I'll venture to guess that many software developers and Linux users don't understand the difference and implications between 'open source' and FOSS/copy-left open source. My point is, let's be understanding and not condescending and judgemental about mistakes or misunderstandings. Most of us are still on a learning journey.Yes, we're in agreement there.
Edit: oh wait, I read "distributed" and I thought this was peer-to-peer, but it seems to require their "cloud" servers… not that great.You don't need their servers, the server side can be entirely self-hosted too, available as Docker images even. From their GitHub:
The server is simple to setup and run for local development and can be deployed to any cloud provider.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 26 May 2020 at 8:32 pm UTC
I am aware randyl, it was added as an update to the previous article talking about the source release, which is linked in the top of this article.I'm sorry if my post came across as instructional, it wasn't intended that way. It seemed apparent you knew all that. I was just adding my opinion in addition.
In my opinion FOSS supporters don't realize how little 'the rest of the world' knows about software licensing, permissive open source, and FOSS/copy-left open source. The OSI has not done a great job educating and providing clarity. I'll venture to guess that many software developers and Linux users don't understand the difference and implications between 'open source' and FOSS/copy-left open source. My point is, let's be understanding and not condescending and judgemental about mistakes or misunderstandings. Most of us are still on a learning journey.Yes, we're in agreement there.
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