ALiVE.OS
Open Source Advanced Light Infantry Virtual Environment
Since you're all lovely people we thought it only right that you got a heads up on the ALiVE.OS release. We kept ALiVE closed during dev to facilitate source management, version control and support for what we knew was going to be quite a complex beast. However, we always intended to open up the source code once we had achieved a stable, feature complete release. We are now largely content that we have achieved that, notwithstanding the few bugs that you guys keep throwing up (which is great by the way, keep doing it!)
So as of today we have changed the licence from a restricted Creative Commons to an open GPL v2 for all builds after 1.0.5.1605051 (the latest official release) and put ALiVE in a public git repo for everyone to fork as you wish. There are some caveats and everything is explained in the licence file but in short:
- ALiVE is free software and may not be monetized in any way (that includes servers that try to get around it with "donations for perks")
- You may release forks of ALiVE but please make it clear that it's not an official version to avoid confusing everyone.
- We strongly encourage everyone to help develop the official Master version using git Branches and Pull Requests.
Not So Frequently Asked Questions
- Why GPL v2? It's an older licence but most of the other big mods like ACE use it, so it'll facilitate code sharing.
- What about ALiVE Plugin? The War Room and its API Plugin (ALiVEPlugIn.dll and ALiVEPlugIn.so ) remain closed for now. Too much propriety stuff in there but there's nothing to stop a clever person getting funky with sys_data and exploring local DB options. ALiVEClient.DLL used for map indexing and some future advanced features is also closed. If you wish to contribute to either, please contact us.
- Mikero's Tools? They're needed for building and indexing maps but the ones we include are an older freeware version. I strongly encourage everyone to buy the latest from Mikero's site. Without his genius, ArmA modding would not be possible.