GD as Open-Source project?

GDevelop general
1

What do you think about turning GD into open-source project?

I mean you don’t get any money except donations from that. Also benefits of the open-source can’t be denied.
For instance, if something (god forbid!) bad happen to you, the project is gone and can’t be continued. If it is open-source, someone else will take over and will continue work on GD.
Also open-source means faster development of both editor and engine. True, there’s little that can’t be done with extensions, but any more complicated things would require some work on lead (and only for now) coder’s part.
Also it means faster bug hunting. It isn’t enjoyable task and now even if bug reporter knows how to fix said bug, he/she can’t do that. If GD would be OSS bugs would be fixed minutes, few hours at most, maybe day after noticing it. You know, more eyes looking, etc.

If you’re not comfortable with any of existing OSS licenses (that may be other reason why GD is not open-source), why won’t roll your own? Author of Powercraft Minecraft mod (MightyPork, if I’m correct) did it and it worked for him pretty well (instead of new version every few months, new version every month or so, also versions after open-source release had more features even though there was less time to develop them).

2

It is not impossible that one day GD will be open source but i’ve the (maybe not rational) fear that one day I could stumble upon a software forked from GD and illegally sold at the price 79.99$.
( See AutoIt license related issues : autoitscript.com/forum/topic … -opinions/ )

Currently, official extensions are open source under a not restrictive license : zlib/png license. If one day I make GD open source, I will probably use for the rest of the code base ( i.e : the editor and the engine ) a license like GPL so that no clone of GD could be made without releasing the source code.

3

Be careful with engine though. I’m not license expert, but it can mean that if you make game with GD and engine would be GPL’d you’d have to release code of your game.

4

In this case, we can imagine an “extra” clause allowing any project created with the editor to be not tied to the GPL license.

5

Maybe you should also not allow people to decompile their own compiled EXEs so that people don’t steal the engine and create their own game making software with it, Game Maker does that (I imagine for a similar reason).
Just an idea.

6

In fact, the threat is not really related to compiled games, but I’m afraid that some people could use the source code of Game Develop so as to make some very small changes and then sell the product using a new name ( Or use at least part of GD into commercial products ).

7

Another advantage of opensourcing GD is separating engine and editor in the long run. What do I mean? Well, now GD can only export desktop games, because engine uses SFML. But I can imagine, if GD would be OSS, that someone would port engine and all basic extensions (with those which are internal ones such as Text object, etc.) to another language, for example JS which would lead to HTML5 export.

All is really needed to do such thing is to write GDG file parser (and since it’s xml it should be easy) and port extensions.

8

I think if you use GPL, anyone who uses your source code in their work has to release the code under GPL too (legally), I’m not a GPL expert though, could be wrong, probably be best to read up on that.

9

I’m already working on a such task, so as to allow the creation of “super extensions” which could provide support for new platforms ( such as JS+HTML5 for example ).
Thus, I’m creating a library called Game Develop Core which defines all the main concepts of a game, like the structure of a scene, an object, events and which implements some features ( like some programming tools like the parser for parsing expressions ) and some general GUI windows.
The idea is that thanks to a such library, it would be easier to support new platforms and above all, it would allow to integrate these new platforms to the editor : Basically, the creator of a “super extension” extends the classes provided to GDCore so as to implement all the required features, and then, the editor can automatically uses the new platform as the editor would be in the long term only based on GDCore features.

It’s still a long term project, but GDCore can already be seen in the SDK.
I think it’s important as if someone is motivated enough to try to port GD to a new platform, GDCore would help to use the already existing components and to integrate the new platform directly inside the IDE.