From the archive
Canabalt "Open Source" Details, Licensing and Extra Information
On December 31, 2010, a day after Canabalt's source went up on GitHub, the studio wrote a second post to clear up the confusion about what people could do with it. Wikipedia's articles on Canabalt and on commercial games with later released source code cite it.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
Two licenses
The engine, the studio's first serious port of the Flixel library to iOS, came under the MIT license, the same as Flixel for Flash: use it for anything. The game-specific code, art, music and sound came under a proprietary license, because Canabalt was still a commercial product that helped pay the studio's monthly bills.
What the studio wanted to allow
- Sharing the source with other developers, with credit where it made sense.
- Downloading, building, changing and playing with the game on your own machine.
- Forking and modifying it in public on GitHub.
What it did not want
Anyone building the game more or less as it was and putting it on a store, free or paid, on any platform. The post admitted its wording might be too strict to allow the uses it wanted, and asked readers to suggest better license language.
Is that open source?
By its own account, not in the strict sense: open source licenses let anyone redistribute the whole work, and the game's content could not be. The fair description is an open source engine with published game code. Anyone reusing it today should read the license files in the repository itself, which govern rather than any summary.