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EA to open source part of Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert

By - | Views: 18,673

With the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection releasing next month for Windows, EA had a bit of an announcement to make today in regards to open source.

Posting on Reddit as well as the Steam page, EA announced that both Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert will see their data being opened up. They will release "TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license". This is being done, they say, as a result of a collaboration between them and the community and they went with the GPL to "ensure compatibility with projects like CnCNet and Open RA".

This is quite surprising, I will admit. They already released the originals free back in 2010, during the 15th anniversary so this sounds like a nice step further. If it helps other projects reimplement more of them, then that's a win-win for everyone. Hopefully they will eventually do the same for more.

Although the Remastered Collection won't officially support Linux, do check out OpenRA if you haven't before, which supports the classic Westwood strategy games in a free and open source game engine. It's not fully the same, due to plenty of modernization but it's close and has support for a lot of the single-player campaigns, AI battles and cross-platform online play.


Feels like we're currently living in upside-down land. We have EA doing actual open source under the GPL, and on the other side we have id Software who used to release their game engines as open source now putting invasive anti-cheat into them like with DOOM Eternal.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Open Source, RTS
46 Likes
About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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eldaking May 20, 2020
Wow, what I'm the most impressed is that it is actually under the GPL (and he says it is, at least in part I guess, to make sure they are compatible with OpenRA and CnCnet).

This is quite nice. It probably enables a lot of moddability, like Civ 4 did, and is huge for this kind of project.
Cyril May 20, 2020
That's not the case yet, but this is truly "open source" and "free software", just thinking of other some companies out there who didn't really understand what it is...

But what exactly does these .dll files? How that huge this announcement is? I read the post on Steam but it could be clearer IMO.
kusochi May 20, 2020
That is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?
appetrosyan May 20, 2020
RMS was right, strict copyleft does work and we should be releasing more software that necessitates free licensing. I would have been fine with an MIT license, but this is just fantasiptic, not many companies release that!
Kristian May 20, 2020
Quoting: kusochiThat is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?

In fact they released the source code of the original Simcity. Also under the GPLv3.
DrMcCoy May 20, 2020
Huh, okay, I admit, this is pretty great. GPL, too, nice.

Now, if any EA people are reading this and want to do the same for BioWare's Aurora engine and derivates, i.e. NWN to DA2, I'd be even more happy... :P


Last edited by DrMcCoy on 20 May 2020 at 9:46 pm UTC
Mal May 20, 2020
  • Supporter
Proton anyone? I've quite a few memories with those two titles.
Dunc May 21, 2020
QuoteThis is quite surprising, I will admit.
I think we have a contender for GoL Understatement of the Year. :)
ziabice May 21, 2020
Microsoft loves Linux, EA releases GPL sources, Pulseaudio broke my microphone so I can't do calls while smart working... are we living in the Upside Down?
Arten May 21, 2020
Quoting: kusochiThat is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?

It still can be. Guy from EA who is behind C&C remaster project love C@C and is passionate about it. He bring Petroglyph games (former Westwood guys) into it. So i think, big part of this is really this one guy, not EA as a whole.
You can se his atitude from this video.
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