Yo Frankie! to be available for the masses in Ubuntu Lucid

Posted: 2010-02-24

I excitedly blogged about Yo Frankie! once before when i said it was "available to the masses" in Karmic, but it still had to be acquired through PlayDeb. Now, thanks to the attention we've raised to get Yo Frankie packaged, all the legalities (sorting out the licensing) have been dealt with and we managed to get it in Lucid just in the nick of time. This time i'm excited to let you know that the availability of this game has increased once again. 

This is an important title for free and open source gaming, and those of you weighing in on the "can FOSS games work?" debate should pay close attention. Although this is not a game i would recommend for a non-FOSS gamer, it does debunks the main arguments against the viability of FOSS games. It's currently the best example of what can be done, even in such a small time frame with a handful of team members, because they had a solid development structure including proper art direction and a sound funding model. 
It's currently perhaps the most beautiful FOSS game available, and it was created entirely with FOSS tools. Yo Frankie! is the product of the Blender Foundation's first Open Game Project, one of many of their open projects organized with the goal of stimulating the development of Blender and providing quality examples of what can be produced using only free and open source software. It has successfully funded itself and the development of Blender, while validating FOSS game, tools, and content. The Morevna Project has similar goals for creating a full-length anime film using entirely FOSS tools to be released as Free content. The Blender Foundation has taken the important first step, or leap, proving that such projects can be successful and providing one funding model among others that can work for similar projects. 


If you're a free culture advocate, you already know that software and content (and games just happen to be an intensive mix of both) should be free, and there are many examples like this that prove they can be free, and the only thing missing is more people working on projects like this. We're getting there. It's all happening.