Well it's no surprise, but there is a bit confusion about the terms and license and stuff for the version of Canabalt we released on github yesterday.  We have never tried something like this, and the few hours of research I did yielded unsatisfactory results, but as always I was very eager to get the release out!  I think we're close to having things set up right, but I wanted to go through and explain how our licensing is currently set up in a little more detail, and then explain our intent/desire about the ideal situation.  If any of you out there have more experience and insight into this matter, and want to email us some suggestions after you've read the full post, we'd love to get some advice about how to label these things and what to actually put into the license.

The Way It Is Now

Currently we have two licenses - one for the engine, and one for the content.  This seems to be the standard way of doing things, as far as I can tell.  The game engine, our first serious port of Flixel to iOS, is licensed under the MIT license, a very lightweight and permissive license that allows pretty much everything and anything.  The Flash version of Flixel is MIT as well, and folks have used it for commercial ventures, art projects, whatever.  This is phenomenal and exactly how we want this stuff to work.

Our actual game-specific code, artwork, music, and sound are currently licensed as "proprietary," which I think means basically only we are allowed to publicly distribute them.  This is partly because we have copyrights and trademarks over a lot of this stuff, partly because Canabalt is still a commercial product that helps to support our little company.  You can also check out the project README file for more info.  This is the part that has swiftly gotten hairy, though, as obviously github is distributing these things as well, but obviously we want that to be able to happen.  This is probably a good time to segue into the next section...

 

The Way We Want It To Be

Flixel for iOS we very much want to be MIT license, and it is, so that's that.  But this is how we want the licensing to work for the rest of the stuff:

Things That Are Awesome: sharing the source files with other developers (crediting us when logical/reasonable), downloading and compiling the game locally, modifying and tweaking the game locally, and even publicly forking, modifying, and tweaking the game source on github.

Things That Are NOT Awesome: compiling and distributing the game essentially as-is for free or for profit on commercial platforms (including desktop, mobile, console, etc).  Canabalt still helps pay our monthly bills, and it would obviously suck to have somebody just put a free version of up on the App Store.

The way our license is currently worded may be too strict to allow for the Awesome things, though it likely does block the NOT Awesome things.  We're very open to suggestions for existing licenses or legal language that will help us cover the game-specific code and content in such a way that we can achieve all the things detailed above.  Bonus points if the language is human readable and makes these use cases/rights obvious, making this post happily obsolete!

 

A Few Other Details

What this likely means is that Canabalt itself is not "open source" in the strictest definition of the term, and it is certainly not "free" by any stretch of software activist imagination.  If you have insight into what we should be calling this release (open source engine with... browsable game code??  I don't even know) we'd definitely appreciate that as well.

Finally, we are currently NOT looking for porting partners to put Canabalt on other platforms.  If/when that changes, we will make a public announcement on the company twitter account, likely with an accompanying blog post explaining the details, platforms of interest, etc.  In the meantime, we hope that you enjoy digging through the source ("open" or not) and really appreciate all the feedback we've gotten so far.

Oh one more thing - the Indie iPhone Holiday Sale has been extended through this weekend!  This is your last chance to get all 6 games (Drop7, Eliss, Solipskier, Spider, Osmos, and Canabalt) for just $0.99 each, a third of which goes to support Child's Play, a great charity that gets toys and books and games to sick kids in hospitals around the world.  Thanks and have a great new year!