This is exciting – I opened llor.nu up as an open source project today. This means that you can download the source and get it running on your machine, but more importantly, it means you can contribute to the production application and see your fixes/features on the live game.

From the start of this project I always expressed how important I felt the players are, and how they shape the game in significant ways, and how listening to them is important.

Opening the project amplifies this belief. While a small group of core contributors will continue to hold the line when it comes to deciding what patches make it into the production version, that line will be drawn by the help of indepedent developers who see problems, or think the game would benefit from their contributions.

I’ve picked the BSD license for the code, which means that there’s a lot of flexibility. There was a great wrestling match in my head over whether I should be so open, but in the end, all the fears I had over what might happen if the software were so open didn’t make sense. If people spinoff new versions with neat features, I can incorporate those features. At worst, there will be a lot of clones, but I suspect that if I continue doing what I’m doing, the original will remain the best.

I’ll follow up with some more info in later posts, but for now, go check out the already active development site. We’re rushing towards a 1.0 release, at which point we’ll close the beta and officially launch the game.