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Copyleft Games

 

I'm a co-founder of the Copyleft Games Group, an software project umbrella
organization being formed in New Hampshire in the spirit of the Software
Freedom Conservancy (http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/).

CGG is intended to;

   - provide a legal umbrella for copyleft games projects to process
   donations without individual developers having to include it in personal
   taxes
   - optionally provide copyright assignment (ala FSF) such that if a
   license dispute ever gets to court, (A)GPL enforcement is easier
   - provide education for ethical business models for developing and
   hosting copyleft games


I'm also the maintainer of a game engine project, PySoy (www.pysoy.org).
PySoy provides;

   - efficient 3d rendering tuned for mainstream Mesa-supported free
   software OpenGL drivers
   - fully integrated physics without special hardware (velocity, joints,
   collision, etc)
   - 3d audio with patent-clear codecs (strereo and fade, waveform offset,
   doppler effect, etc)
   - networking via XMPP and ICE-UDP
      - shares "buddy list" between games and desktop IM clients
      - can seamlessly chat with friends not running the same game
      - works with an existing gmail, livejournal, jabber, etc accounts
      - advertises to friends that you're playing a specific game via
      personal eventing
      - Jingle ICE-UDP allows game servers to be run behind NAT proxies
      without manual port forwarding
      - Jingle also provides voice chat between players and IM friends, P2P
      game content distribution, etc
      - free software game projects working together on standards,
      http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/gaming
   - multithreaded to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs and optimized
   for MMX, SSE, etc with liboil
   - built on Gnome libraries; GLib, GDK, GEGL, Cairo, etc
   - designed primarily for Python, extensible in any language that supports
   GObject (C, Vala, etc)
   - licensed under the AGPLv3 to protect players rights to play, mod, and
   share games

PySoy is getting wrapped up for the next release (1.0-beta3) before the end
of May, when a Summer of Code student begins work on skeletal animation.
The goal of PySoy is to allow copyleft games to be written rapidly in Python
without having to learn or work with the lower level libraries.

We already have a packaging team on launchpad for PySoy and plan to package
the next release on our PPA.  We'll look for packaging in Main/Universe once
more game projects have started using PySoy, right now we're focused on
finalizing the API for 1.0 release.