Ogre 3D Going "Even More" Open Source
Ogre 3D is a popular 3D graphics engine - and definitely the most popular Open Source 3D graphics engine. It has been used for numerous indie projects, and has started to gain traction on more "mainstream" game projects such as the upcoming RPGs Venetica and Torchlight.

It's gained popularity in part because its licensing - the "LGPL" - was a lot more friendly to commercial developers. The LGPL requires any changes or statically linked additions to be made available to the public in source code form. In practice, this has meant that so long as you dynamically linked the code to your game (for non-programmers: It was a separate file installed with the game), you only had to publish the changes / addition to the engine itself.

Ogre 3D announced a few weeks ago that it was changing the licensing on the next version (1.7) of the engine. The new licensing will be the MIT license - which lacks even the limited "viral" component of LGPL, which Ogre has used up until now. (Ogre also had a "commercial" proprietary license - the OUL - for those companies that wanted to use it without the source code commitment).

The new license does away with the requirement to release source code, and the OUL will be phased out for version 1.7 and beyond. Will this hurt Ogre 3D's growth as an open source project? The project leaders think not:

"While not requiring modified source to be released might initially seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to."

An interesting observation on their part, and it makes sense. And as Ogre 3D is a fairly popular (and most technically hard-core) open source projects that has been kicking around for a while now, they'd probably know. Anybody who's had to work with code written by someone who either didn't know what they were doing, or didn't care who would have to maintain it after them, can probably understand where they are coming from. Grudgingly-provided source code is not much better than no source code at all.

So if that percentage of quality providers can remain constant, it makes sense that the best way to grow it is to increase the size of the user base. The less restrictive license may do that, especially for larger, commercial studios (who have an automatic allergic reaction to GPL and LGPL, and not entirely without reason).

The biggest concern here might be that some company might then make some minor, proprietary changes to the engine and then sell it as a competitor to Ogre 3D. But to be able to sell it, they'd need to make some pretty substantial changes to be worth the price difference, and the Ogre 3D's team hopes that this approach will make bigger advances in the quality of their own team's output.

Anyway, here's hoping this new approach will help catapult Ogre 3D to new heights as a free, fully-featured 3D engine!

Labels: programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:52 AM (Permalink)