Carthaginian - Credit: wildfiregames.com

Wildfire Games has decided to make their work-in-progress RTS game 0 A.D. free content by releasing the source code under the GPL v2 and putting all of the artwork for it under a CC-BY-SA license. While it is not yet playable, the developers hope to attract new developers to the project:

We’ve been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We’ve come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can’t devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.

While Wildfire’s initial contribution is free content, whether or not future contributions will fall under that category is up in the air at the moment:

Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we’re not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we’d like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we’d be interested in discussion of this issue.

The cynic in me wants to say that they’re doing this to revive a dying project that lacks developers, but even if that were true, this is a significant contribution to the free content gaming world, especially since the current offering of open content strategy engines don’t look nearly as good as 0 A.D. does. I’m a bit wary of the licensing of future contributions, but they seem open to discussion about keeping it free. Time will tell, I guess.

• Phoronix article
• 0 A.D. open source page

Doomworld reports that Raven Software, after a decade of pressure from fans, has re-released the source code for Heretic and Hexen under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

Having the code relicensed required a community effort spanning almost a decade. At its height, this included an online petition, an open letter, snail mail campaigns, e-mail, an international action item on GNU.org, insider efforts by Chris Rhinehart of Human Head Studios and Doom’s own John Romero, and other activities carried on individually by countless community members.

This release is of monumental importance, as it will allow GPL Doom source ports to freely integrate support for Heretic and Hexen without requiring the code to be rewritten from scratch or to be emulated through empirical testing. The door is also now open for new ports such as “Chocolate” Heretic and Hexen, and for such ports to be distributed in free software packages.

Both of these games are well over 10 years old. I don’t see the point in keeping the content of the game itself proprietary long after the game stopped being sold. But at least this will allow those with old copies of the game to play it on modern operating systems.

• Doomworld
• SourceForge
• Slashdot

Apparently, Virgin America has been holding a competition for people to submit open source games for their Red System.

They’re about to launch in-flight wireless internet soon, and they’re holding a competition for open source games, the winners of which will be available for people to play in-flight (entries are still being accepted).

Virgin America’s head of in-flight entertainment, Charles Ogilvie, brought us on board a plane that was empty and at rest between flights. We poked around with the computers and displays (all Linux!) and we tried to IM our friends using the pilot’s controls in the cockpit. This did not work so well.

Can anyone find a link to the competition? Googling has gotten me no where.

• Boing Boing TV
• Linux Games

After many years, Wine has finally reached 1.0.

The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road!

While compatibility is not perfect yet, thousands of applications have been reported to work very well. Check http://appdb.winehq.org to see the details for your favorite applications.

Yea, I know.  This one is late too.  I still have never gotten anything I want to work with Wine.  Something makes me doubt I will be able to play Battle Realms or Morrowind with this version either =P.

• WineHQ