This just in: A fellow by the name of Greg Meach has stolen the Open Source Dark Nova code and released a game called Hyper Warp, which he has on sale for $6.99! A while back @gregmeach asked us if we would license our art and we asked him if he’d like to collaborate with us on a better Dark Nova. Greg declined and released Hyper Warp using our code. This would be OK except that he’s refusing to open the code to the community as required by the GPL. To add further inslut, he’s even using some of our copyrighted images his game!!!

As most of you know, Dark Nova is a port of Pieter Spronk’s well known Space Trader game which in turn has elements of the Open Source game Dope Wars. In suport of these great games and a long open source tradition we published our code and made it freely available to the community via Google Code under the GPL. We’ve had the honor of collaborating with Pieter because of it. Greg is taking the low road and trying to profit from ours and Pieters work without giving back to the community. Dirty pool old man… dirty pool.

Please don’t support Hyper Warp until @gregmeach releases the code. We’re happy to see people using our code but we do want derivative works to be open sourced so that we can all benefit. Uphold the GPL! Support Open Source!

Tweet at @gregmeach and ask him open his code!!!

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UPDATE: 4/6/2010:

After some discussion and legal / licensing explanations, including a comment from Pieter Spronk, the original author of Space Trader, Greg says he will release the code to Hyper Warp. According to his last email to us, he’s preparing a source package which will be sent to us tomorrow. Once we get the code we’ll publish it on our Google Code repo and look at integrating it in to Dark Nova. Greg is a talented guy and his contributions will be helpful.

We’ve learned a lot about open source licensing in the last month! Stay tuned for future developments.

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