Why we love Free Software
14 February 2015
Free Software is software which is not just free-to-download, as in free-to-play, free demo / alpha (where you will still need to pay to get a copy the full thing), but also free as in giving you freedom. Freedom to do (almost) anything you want with it. It is very much about sharing and equal opportunity.
MegaGlest is entirely Free Software, that is, both the complete source code and all the game assets (art) are available under the GPL and compatible licenses, for you to inspect and review, to learn from, to improve upon, to file bugs against and to modify as you like. You could even take the game as it is, modify it entirely and re-release it under a new name.
And that is what we, do, too. Not with MegaGlest, but with all the tiny (or not so tiny) pieces of other peoples’ software which MegaGlest is comprosed of. And there are plenty of these. MegaGlest is is not the work of just a few people. While the current number of regular direct contributors to MegaGlest is limited, dozens of people have been involved in crafting all the softwares which finally end up as this game on your hard disk. It is only because of this that we can afford to develop this game in our spare time, next to our social life, daily routine, and our other hobbies.
Which is why, today, we wish to show our deep appreciation to the developers of all of these software which MegaGlest makes use of, as well as developers of Free Software in general. And we encourage you to do the same - show your love and appreciation for Free Software!
Here’s an incomplete list of the many other software development efforts which allow us to reuse their code so we can assemble MegaGlest:
- Glest (which MegaGlest is a fork of)
- Apache Software Foundation
- Xiph.Org foundation (Vorbis audio format and en-/decoder)
- Feathery FTP (modified version)
- libcurl
- libpng
- libjpeg
- wxwidgets
- Lua
- OpenAL
- ZLib
While MegaGlest could not exist without these softwares, the same goes for all the liberally licensed images, models, music and sounds, fonts etc. we reuse, and the communities which make these reusable.Thank you very much!
For a more complete list refer to our authorship documentations for the game’s source code and game data / assets - and please notify us should you spot any missing references or errors.
