Corona Labs announced yesterday that it’s making its free and cross-platform 2D game engine, Corona, available as open source under the GPLv3 license and commercial licenses. The license for builds and releases remains unchanged and the change applies only to the source code of the engine.
Corona is a popular game engine for creating 2D games and apps for mobile, desktop systems, TV platforms, and the web. It is based on Lua language and makes use of over 1,000 built-in APIs and plugins, and Corona Native extensions (C/C++/Obj-C/Java).
According to Vlad Sherban, product manager for Corona Labs, the Corona team had been discussing making Corona open source ever since it got acquired by Appodeal, back in 2017.
“We believe that this move will bring transparency to the development process, and will allow users to contribute features or bug fixes to make the project better for everyone,” said Sherban.
The team also mentions that transitioning to open source would help them respond quickly to market shifts and changes. It would also ensure that Corona stays relevant at all times for all mobile app developers. Moreover, now that Corona is open source, it will bring more visibility to the development process by letting users see what the engine team is working on and where the project is going. It will also offer extra benefits for businesses as they will be able to acquire a commercial license for source code and customize the engine for certain commercial projects.
Additionally, Corona Labs won’t be collecting any statistics from apps built with daily build 2018.3454 or later. When Corona Labs was a closed source product, it used to collect basic app usage stats such as the number of sessions, daily average users, etc. With Corona available as open source now, there is no need to collect this data.
“Powered by the new open source model and supported by the development of new features and bug fixes will make Corona more community driven — but not without our help and guidance — going open source will provide confidence in the future of the engine and an opportunity to grow community involvement in engine development,” said Sherban.
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