Making Gideros free and open source

atilim

Hello guys,

We've decided to make Gideros free with no restrictions and open source. Currently, we are refactoring the source code to make it available as an open source under MIT license. One of the main reasons of this choice is that Gideros can not be sustained from sold licenses.

We believe with the contributions from open source community, Gideros will be a better supported tool for game development. We're hoping that that'll speed up the development of Gideros and will provide future opportunities.

We'll also continue to develop Gideros because we're actively using it with our internal projects.

Stay tuned.

OZApps

This is one of those Good and Bad things.

Good as the growth of the platform/tool will be faster and more efficient and spread.
It is good because it is an honest assessment of the commercial uptake of the same in comparison to others.
It is still good as you would be one of the contributors to the repo so there WILL be updates

It is not good because you had to change this due to the unsustainable situation.

Still, lets see and hope for good things for Gideros in the coming future and a big Thanks to you for creating it in the first place.

ar2rsawseen

It seems to be a natural decision, there was countless situations, where user requested the source code to modify it themselves, because of the low speed of the updates, thus this will be fixed now

From my point, I just wanted to say, that me, for example, I'm still sticking with Gideros and will use it in most of my personal projects and client works, thus I'm still be hanging out here on the forum

Ninjadoodle

While this might be a good thing for the future development of Gideros, it makes me quite sad on your behalf.

You obviously started this as a business and it really disappoints me to see that you can no longer continue.

You have a MUCH better product on your hands than most of the others on the market.

I hope that Gideros keeps growing and becomes more well known as a consequence.

Thank you and good luck!

petec

I'll echo @Ninjadoodle's comment. I'm also quite sad for you that after all your efforts there wasn't sufficient take up for you to continue. It seems a long time since I happily jumped from Corona to Gideros but I still remember the pleasure of doing so. Thank you so much.

Mells

Hi @atilim,

I'm very sorry to hear that this business model was unsustainable, because the product is good. We had some discussion about it in the past...

I'm not familiar with open source (most of the projects -Blender is an exception- that I knew and went open source died slowly) so I'm wondering :

- If it's unsustainable, that means for you it can't be a priority anymore because you have to pay the bills (indeed we wish we could have supported the dev more) and you refocus your efforts = dev from the core Gideros team will be even slower.
What are the other parts of the business that will be affected? (doc, site, blog, email support, etc)?

- Are there examples of small open source projects that could grow well *without* a core team of dedicated developers that contributed to at least 80% of the updates? For now, the core team being focused on new priorities and the community of dev who could contribute not being organized, it feels like there won't be major updates.
Small updates will be submitted but "someone" will have to review the updates, etc... and that "someone" will have a lot of work.

- A successful open source project needs (I think?) a leader that is present and communicates (like Ton Rosendaal). Due to other priorities that I totally understand, it seems that you can't commit to communicate more. What do you think about the "leadership" after going open source?

So.. I guess my questions can be summed up like : what are the elements that can make us optimistic about this move and what else should users know?

ar2rsawseen

I really don't know how many times @atilim can spend on it, but I know I'm willing to and will do it.

Not that I know everything how Gideros works, also I have couple of diagrams of internal stuff drawn for myself, but it is not the environment where I feel myself at home (I mean c++ and OpenGL), but from what I saw, some developers here on this same forum, dive in so fast and easy, and provided so much based on the closed source project, I can't imagine what they could do with open source.

About website, forum, docs, as I discussed with @atilim it all will stay.

My first priority would probably be to gather core team of developers that
1) are interested in Gideros
2) I can trust
and eventually provide all the access and permissions to them

And in the core team, you are not obliged to work on Gideros, or fix specific bug, it is enough that you use Gideros. And if you use it, you encounter bugs, so you can either report them, or fix them for yourself. and if you fix them, you can also commit changes to the repo. Nothing more is asked.

Some contradictionary features, that are exclusive (you can either have this or that, but not both) may have core group voting, or eventually community voting.

And then we would need to expand and grow the core group.

There are also features that can request large amount of time. For example, HTML5 export, so I could list what skills and technologies are needed to achieve that, and we can crowdfund and hire experts (even someone from the core team) to implement that.

Additionally there can be donation page or patreon page to sponsor some specific small feature or fix, or simply express your gratitude to the core team, which can be divided evenly in the latter case or go to specific person in the former case.

Thats the vague plan of I would do, or what I think should be done. But the main point is, I really like Gideros and will keep using it, while it suits my needs, even if I'm the only one doing it.

Ninjadoodle

@ar2rsawseen I would only be too happy to be a part of this. I've been making flash games for years and I'm currently using Gideros to port my first mobile game, so still learning some of the ins and outs (but doing pretty well).

I'm not much of a coder (I learn what I need to), but I'm definitely happy to help with Gideros testing / writing tuts for beginners and providing promotional gfx/cartoons to make the website a fun place.

Feel free to pm me about this, as I really believe in Gideros and I'd love to see it take over the world haha

eezing

To the Gideros team, you've created something really great. Thank you for all of your hard work.

SinisterSoft

I think that making LongFord part of the new opensource Gideros should be a priority. This way there will be more destinations.

Also will the open source version be based on Gideros 2 or the existing Gideros?

yubaro

@atilim @ar2rsawseen Gideros is great and must follow the path upwards. I am new to the development, I started a year ago, in what can help, please tell me. Gideros is a great tool and we put the shoulder to make it grow.

talis

I am sad that the business model didn't go well. As a subscriber i always try to support Gideros project, and will continue to support in any condition as far as it exists. It is not only because i am using Gideros in my projects or the product fully satisfies my needs(i developed programs with gideros not games ) , i like the commitment of the team and the users. In addition to all that i like friendly atmosphere between users and team.

I am sure that with such friendly, and good users this decision will work up the development process.
So i am wishing best of luck to all of us for future of Gideros.

atilim

Thank you @all for the kind words

@Mells, currently we're shifting our business to mobile game development and we'll be developing games with Gideros. Therefore we continue improving Gideros.

At first, @ar2rsawseen and I will organize the commits, pull requests, etc. But I hope the core group will grow up in the future.

john26

I'm sorry to hear that Gideros is not sustainable as a commercial product but excited to think of the opportunities for open source. I would certainly be happy to join the core group of open source developers and would bring across any skills I can from Longford.

It's a tough world out there. If a successful and high quality product like Gideros cannot survive commercially it makes you wonder what could. I remember transitioning across from Corona and being amazed at how bullet proof Gideros was. Plus the positive, friendly attitude was refreshing compared to the "other place". It's been a great experience being part of Gideros!

There are really two pressures that I see which make it difficult for cross platform frameworks, race to the bottom in app stores and the rise of Unity. I've been to a few developers conferences and they all seem to be on Unity these days. Plus 3-D is looking increasingly essential in modern games even on largely 2D games. E.g. a dice game where the dice are 3D on a 2D background. Maybe we can think about this as a possibility...? Could Gideros become 3D, maybe in a simplified way?

Mells

There is a lesson to be learnt here.
If you want the project to be successful from now, you have to do things differently and be profitable - the fact that it's a free and open source product means it's an even bigger priority (think Wordpress).

Otherwise, you'll never be able to fund development of new features (and to me crowdfunding is not a good idea).

What should have been done differently, and how to implement it in the next 3/6/12 months? is, I believe, the way to think about this project.
If there isn't any brainstorming about "what was done well" and "what could have been made better", nothing will be learnt and the future of Gideros will be unpredictable.

@John26 > "if a successful and high quality product like Gideros cannot survive commercially it makes you wonder what could."
There are tons of profitable businesses out there, the bad idea from now would be "not" looking at what they do and only focus on product development.

Without profit, a business is not a business. It's a labor of love and can never grow healthily.

Nascode

@atilim @ar2rsawseen First of all, i must say thank you for developing Gideros in the first place. Many of our works are based on Gideros which is enjoyable to work with. Our team doesnt need to tacle engine side and allow us to concentrate on the content.

We still have one or two games in our current pipeline, so we will continue to use Gideros. I hope the community could handle this new direction together for better development of Gideros

@Mells

Without profit, a business is not a business. It's a labor of love and can never grow healthily.

Wow i could resonate with this statement, just like for us to continue working on next title, we should prepare to tackle the future cost of development

ps: It's amazing people care so much with Gideros on this thread

phongtt

I really feel sad to see Gideros not being able to sustain as a profitable business.

As a game developer doing business on games, my main interest is making great games with a great tool like Gideros (though there are still rooms for improvements as well as new features, new platforms; but you have already done a great job during the last few years with such a small team). I don't have enough time and experience to make an engine, nor can I contribute much at a low level work of engine development.

Focusing on engine development would mean I have to invest more time and cost while my game business is not profitable either. And in reality, right now my team has been already quite exhausted with just game development work (internal projects + client projects).

Anyway, I will see if I can contribute something to the Gideros open source project.

I know this must be a very hard decision for Gideros team. Thank you a lot for all your hard work. Best wishes to you on your next journey.

altai

Hi all Giderans,
Sad news for me. I didn't like this decision but can't do anything for now. Also I agree with Mells thoughts. Please rethink your decisions Gideros Team. I would like to say some Gideros insufficiencies, some publicity issues; less tutorials(especially box2d), capable, friendly but unaesthetic forum, bottleneck of lua, very plain IDE, without 3D support(rising trend) etc.

I wish If a debate would had been six moths ago about Gideros future, I would suggest core developer to unite with Polycode( Ivan Safrin ) and Batterytechsdk( Robert Green ) with 3D support, Desktop support, multiple language coding, particle engine, SDL support(another Polycode fork), improvable Polycode cross-platform IDE with capable 3D mesh viewer etc. I think GIDEROS, BATTERYTECHSDK, POLYCODE, R.U.B.E are very good products but All of you guys(Ivan Safrin, Atilim Çetin, Robert Green, iforce2d) don't give a chance of breakthrough(Atılım) with partnership/collaboration.

I don't know how much feasible to do this, maybe Görkem will be against my thoughts as a veteran KDE Desktop developer? I like open source projects but I don't agree with pure open source development philosophy/dynamics completely. English is not my native language, it's hard to explain my thoughts so that I recommend you all Giderans, Please do encourage/invite Ivan Safrin, Atilim Çetin, Robert Green and R.U.B.E developer(iforce2d) about partnership. I think They miss more profitable business opportunities at the sector of mobile game development. Feel free to correct my mistakes.
Regards all of you

CitizenK

I'm sad to hear this but I kind of expected it for quite some time already. While I think Gideros is one of the best, if not the best, tool to quickly create very good 2D mobile games, it never really got the attention it would deserve.

One of the main issues for me is that Gideros is a very easy way to create games, but getting into it is extremely dry and even unnecessarily hard. While you can get into it, if you want to, It gives away what would be the strongest selling point. Making games easily.

A series of video tutorials which take a new user by the hand to create games and sell them would be a first step. A great documentation website the second. See the PHP website for example, with lots of user contributions on every single page. Even if anyone doesn't like PHP (which everyone seems to do nowadays), there is a reason why it became so popular. Gideros is in many ways similar to PHP, it can do the job and can do it easy and quickly. But it lacks the community contributions (a forum isn't enough, and yes, the people in here are great but the forum itself is very ugly) and the ease to start with it.

Gideros should concentrate on the ease of the whole Gideros experience of making games.

Sadly I can't really envision Gideros to work well as open source either. It would require a much bigger community. Sorry to be so blunt about it. I hope I'm wrong.

ar2rsawseen

I honestly don't know why it is a sad news.
the development was slow and inconsistent, and it will probably still be this way, except, NOW others will have the option to jump in and help and improve, if they want to. So it is definitely won't be worse

Additionally every time speaking with either some big studio or hard core freelance developer about Gideros, first response was, I won't start trying it because it is not open sourced and there is no control for me over it. Now that is not a problem anymore

seppsepp

Guys, heads up! Start to support Gideros by writing some great open source code and everything will be fine in one way or another.

Btw: Maybe someone will start to port iOS stuff to Swift . Just an idea ...

OZApps

I honestly don't know why it is a sad news.

I think I can safely say that it is sad news because it had to be made open source not for the love of open source but circumstantially due to economic sustainability related issues.

the development was slow and inconsistent, and it will probably still be this way, except, NOW others will have the option to jump in and help and improve, if they want to. So it is definitely won't be worse

Even though a lot of developers here could tinker with the C++ code and improve things faster, the onus or responsibility was solely on @Atilim and everyone waited for the updates, now there could be several versions as unique as each individuals requirements and not all of that would be back into the repo. However that is again a point of view that could differ from person to person.

It is a wait and watch situation, but am hopeful that it will pan out well, there could be hiccups where there could be compilation issues, compatibility and reliance on 3rd person libraries, etc.

SinisterSoft

@ar2rsawseen I agreee, a lot of developers would not have used it because of being burnt in the past by other closed source kits - If games were my sole source of income then it would have been the same for me too actually. It's just too risky otherwise.

Now it's open source we don't have to rely on you two to add things like multi-touch to the emulator, etc - we can have a go ourselves and if successful submit/suggest the changes to the main build.

I personally think you should still keep the labs/extras as paid - maybe with source being provided too in future?

Platypus

This is incredible news.
Let's get to work.

tkhnoman

When i wait for something, i got nothing.
When i surrender and wait for nothing, i got super weird things...

bysreg

I'm sorry to hear that. Makes me wonder how corona can sustain itself ? higher price ? or them just being in the silicon valley and thus able to attract investors ? From the looks of it and from the comments, it seems gideros is technically more attractive than corona (cmiiw).

That being said, where is the link to the source code ?

Platypus

I really hope that the creations of @BowerAndy, @Javi and @John26 (BhWax, JVBridge and Longford) can be merged with Gideros Studio to create a single tool (and that the single-click export menu will soon include Android, iOS, Mac OS, OUYA, Windows, BlackBerry and maybe more).

If so, perhaps Gideros will become the industry standard for multiplatform development [since it would be able to do everything Objective-C (Swift?) can do on Apple systems, everything Java can do on Android systems, plus extra things that can easily be achieved using Lua in Gideros].

It would be excellent to hear professional developers on the news in 2016, saying things like 'We had been developing Apple and Android software separately, using Objective-C and Java, for XX years. Our recent switch to Gideros Studio has allowed us to produce multiplatform software with consistent behaviour and appearance, in much less time, and for more destination platforms'.

OZApps

I'm sorry to hear that. Makes me wonder how corona can sustain itself ? higher price ? or them just being in the silicon valley and thus able to attract investors ? From the looks of it and from the comments, it seems gideros is technically more attractive than corona (cmiiw).

There are a couple of theories on how they survived, they were a funded startup and the way startups pay their staff is interesting, secondly yes they are in the Silicon Valley and backed by some big names and had slightly more money than Gideros. Lastly, their model did hold people hostage at times and hence could get finances, now they are Free to gain further momentum. There are plenty more reasons but they are more or less hinged around this. A lot of staff left it self explains a couple of things.

That being said, where is the link to the source code ?

I guess Atilim did mention that he is cleaning up the source to be able to open source it, I guess it will be a while (week to 4 weeks) before the GitHub repository link would be made available. Any faster is wonderful.

techdojo

@atilim & crew - like the others above, I'm sorry to hear you had to take this route, however I think a lot of good can come from this, I think it's really great that you and your family made this SDK something to be proud of - and you grew this community so that we all felt like part of your extended family.

I know I've not been around here much in the last few months - but work pressures aside, Gideros was (I think) mostly a hobby for the majority of forum members.

Maybe there's more low hanging fruit to be had developing some paid add-on's, tool's, utilities, starter-kits etc for Gideros, maybe like Unity and a load of other projects developing an internal app store that's baked inside the IDE?

Anyway good luck with your development and I hope setting Gideros free will ensure it grows to be as big as Corona (if not bigger).

Jon...

vitalitymobile

I am sorry to hear that. Good luck to you guys

Like @Platypus, i am really hope to see @BowerAndy, @Javi and @John26 and other coding guru to come back and make Gideros better!

FlimFlamboyant

Well, this is a bummer. Gideros is the most solid and well thought-out framework I've ever used, not that I've used a lot of them. I wish this would have worked out; you guys have done a great job getting it to where it is.

I'm glad it will live on, but I do worry about its future. Obviously, the team will continue to manage a branch for its own purposes. Will this be accessible? Open source can be great when managed well, but I've seen plenty of examples of what happens when it isn't.

Gideros has served me very well since I left my former employer and struck out on my own, and I'm not far from releasing my first game on the app store. Good luck to you guys, and thanks for a great product!