FAQ about Corona opensource

There are two main spaces where developers can chat with each other and with Corona’s team:

• Forum
• CDN Slack, #opensource  

Join us!

We’ll be pleased if the community gets more involved and initiates new features that help to improve user’s projects. Indubitably, we will collect all the ideas to discuss them together and choose which items to implement. Corona’s team will manage these processes and implement the features.

Yes, absolutely. Many popular game engines are fully open sourced. You may easily find the dozens of open source game engines on GitHub or other places.

We are not going to make changes to the Corona Marketplace. Don’t worry, our store will continue to work the same as before: you may buy and sell your projects and earn income. Feel free to mail us about the Marketplace to [email protected].

Paid and free plugins will continue to work same as they worked before the transition to the open source model of development. You can buy plugins from our Marketplace and start to use it in builds according to their documentation.

Simple answer: only if you want to make open source games/apps. There are three scenarios that you can choose from.

1. You can download the Corona source code under the GPLv3 license, disable the splash screen and build your games and apps, however, those games have to be distributed under the GPLv3 license, i.e you have to make your source available. Games and apps based on the open source distribution of Corona you be distributed using same license (GPLv3).
2. You can download the Corona source code, negotiate a commercial license agreement with Corona Labs and build a version of Corona that doesn’t require a splash screen. With this, you can then distribute your games and apps without opening your own source.
3. Continue to use Corona with a splash screen or purchase the Splash Screen Control plugin, which helps Corona Labs continue to keep Corona up-to-date. This is the easiest and recommended way to go.

Corona will be dual-licensed under both a commercial and open source licenses.

• A commercial license is available that will allow you to build commercial products based on the Corona source code. You will need to enter into an agreement with Corona Labs to get rights to uses source code as commercially licensed. Example of when such a license is required is to customize the engine to a specific commercial game.
• Alternatively, you choose to use Corona under GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3). This license is available to everyone, but all products built on top of code licensed this way must retain the same license and become open source themselves. Example for using this license is in non-commercial open source games, educational purposes or to contribute to the engine.

If you just want to build games using Corona nothing would change for you. You can still download public release or daily builds and build commercial software with it for free without any royalties or limits.

We believe that going open source will bring transparency to the process of development of the engine. This way our users would be able to see exactly what team is doing and where the project is going. We think this should give you confidence in the future of Corona. For some businesses, having an open source engine is a great opportunity to contribute needed features in a timely fashion, or get a commercial license for source code and customize the engine for their needs.

If you want to get more involved, there are plenty things you can do, like testing, providing support on forums, implementing features and bug fixes, help us with documentation, tutorials, marketing, and promo materials, and many other ways to contribute. We are still at the beginning of figuring out the processes with the community and we are looking for participation of experienced users. Please, message us about your ideas about Corona development, or how you want to contribute and applicable skills to [email protected] or to @coronarob in Slack, #opensource. Let’s discuss it!

Yes, absolutely. We have a stable product right now and we are planning to keep it up to date with the latest requirements and releases of iOS/Android. This means that you will be able to build your apps and games for Android and iOS devices.

Our team would be actively involved in development of the open source product: providing support, bug fixes, platform updates of the engine. We are also responsible to maintain the stability of the Corona Marketplace and plugin ecosystem.

We are using GitHub’s issue tracker for bugs and feedback form for feature requests. Going to open source doesn’t detain bug fixing. For your convenience, we moved all open tickets to the GitHub’s issue tracker. Please look through existing issues to try to find the answer to your question before creating a new one. Follow these recommendations for using Issues. We will continue to use feedback.coronalabs.com for feature requests. You will find a step-by-step form there.

The Corona business model remains unchanged. We plan to continue to sell plugins in The Corona Marketplace, have revenue share based plugins and provide premium support. Additionally, we are planning to license source code for commercial usage. We are still looking to expand our earnings to have more resources to develop a better engine. This is not final and may change, any advice from the community is welcome.

We are looking forward to the new open sourced life stage of the Corona.

In 2019 our main focus will be on developing the community around Corona. The main product focus for the beginning of 2019 will be to modernize the Android build system. Next year’s roadmap is in works now.