Turning OS/2 Games to Open Source

Many of you might notice that I started the "Turn OS/2 Games 2 Open Source" campaign recently. The general idea of this is to turn old and unsupported OS/2 games to freeware and/or Open Source, so the OS/2 and eCS community can continue some of these projects or learn from the code of it. Another topic with this project is that people within the OS/2 Community that might not be able to do some programming can also participate and help out with this project! Most of us knows how to search and look for information and send an e-mail - right?

The Open Source OS/2 games campaign started as a logical next step from the OS2 World Gaming project site (http://www.os2world.com/games). There are games that still are shareware and haven't been updated in a long time. For example, there are some games that haven't been updated since 1996 and has been distributed anyway as shareware, even if the author is unreachable by snail mail or e-mail.

For the moment I have had a good response from most OS/2 authors. The majority of them didn't have any problems of sharing the source with the OS/2 community, since the almost forgotten about the code. Many developers didn't know under which license to release their code - so I have always suggested the GNU GPL license which will maintain their game free and open source.

And you can always offer to help the author bundling the source with the executables (putting it together into one zip file), add some extra text on the readme files and add some change to the license with the Author's permission (possible add the GNU GPL License).

For the moment following games are released as Open Source since I started this campaign:
 * SeaHaven Towers (freeware, thanks to J Daniel Kulp)
 * MakMan (thanks to Markellos Diorinos)
 * Asteroids (thanks to Todd Crowe)
 * BallsBall (thanks to Dmitry Ivanov)
 * Drift (thanks to Dirk Vandenheuvel)
 * Gross/2 (thanks to Bill Moore)
 * Connect (Four thanks to Andreas Bergen)
 * Othello (thanks to Peter Wansch)
 * BirdMan (thanks to Michael Bruestle)
 * The Compulsive Gambler's Toolkit (thanks to Igloosoft)
 * Lines/2 (thanks to Eugeny Rubtsov)
 * Lites Out (thanks to Herbert Bushong)
 * Ribble (thanks to J.R.Shannon)
 * PM Robots (thanks to Kent Lundberg)
 * PM Equator (thanks to Frank Sven Nestel)
 * Stris (thanks to by Touch of Magic, Rene Straub)

Above-mentioned developers deserve a very special thanks for giving their efforts to open source to the community. Plus, you can check out all the games listed from this URL: http://www.os2world.com/games/

So what are you waiting for? Do you know of any unsupported OS/2 games or other applications for that matter? Let's ask the authors to open source their code or turn it into freeware! The good thing about this project is that everybody can help out with this! Since you don't know how to code or develop games at all - but you might learn how to do this by being part of this project!

Martin Iturbide

OS2 World.Com, Ecuador

Links

 * OS2World Gaming Site - www.os2world.com/games
 * The GNU GPL License - www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php
 * Hobbes - hobbes.nmsu.edu
 * Leo - archiv.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/