The last year started with the first release candidate of Ogre 1.7 [Cthugha] which technically was brought together and published in the twilight of December 31st 2009 and brought an explosion of amazing new features and improvements to Ogre.

Amongst the biggest changes and additions, was the new compositor framework, and our new all-in-one Sample Browser Framework from the Google Summer of Code Student “omniter”, along with the new powerful Terrain component, the RTShaderSystem for on the fly shader generation and an official Apple iOS port for the iPhone and iPad, and let’s not forget the biggest change: Ogre’s switch to the MIT licence.

Since the middle of January we got a new official funny and fearless 3D mascot named ‘Sinbad’ also modelled and animated by “omniter” that comes with the OgreSDK and is used in the Samples and throughout the SDK.

“Nir Hasson” officially joined us in February as a new Ogre Team member, after he has been operating as a member of the team in all but name for quite some time. Nir’s work on the RTShaderSystem was introduced in Ogre 1.7.

In March, we switched from the Sourceforge Subversion repository to Mercurial hosted by BitBucket. Through this switch, we gained far more flexibility in terms of distributed development, allowing everyone to easily fork the Ogre code base, manipulate it and merge back changes that may be interesting for the whole community.

At this point in time, we did not yet know how important  this would become, as the Ogre Founder and Project Leader, Steve ‘Sinbad’ Streeting, in the middle of April suddenly shocked us all by announcing his immediate retirement. With him we lost the most active team member that invested a lot of time and strength in the development of Ogre which unfortunately led to his severe health condition that forced him to step back. Yet Steve assured us that he won’t be entirely gone but stop by from time to time as a regular community member and supporting the Ogre Team where necessary to make sure that his great work still carries on.

The start of a busy summer was marked by months of discussion and countless weeks of transitional work, especially from the community members “jacmoe”, “betajaen” and “spacegaier”. In the end it was worth the trouble, when in June the new TikiWiki replaced the MediaWiki that previously ran for many years. We now have a much more powerful tool at our fingertips to share knowledge about our favorite rendering engine.

Approximately at the same time a secret group of loyal long-time Ogre community members and supporters gathered in the hidden areas of the World Wide Web, organizing a special farewell present for our outgoing project lead in the form of a unique metal statuette, again featuring our newly created Ogre 3D mascot. It was the least we could do, to commemorate the efforts of Steve!

Besides all these more or less official topics, there also was a fast amount of community project work going on. Many great and promising games, applications, libraries and frameworks were published or developed further. To name them all would be extensive, so here are a selected few: Alien Dominion, Blocks, CT Visualization, CloakWorks Shroud, Dynastica, Family Farm, Gorilla, Handball Simulator 2010, Hovercraft, Island Hopping, Kromaia, MOGRE, NeoAxis Engine, Nimbus, NxOgre, Ogitor, OgreKinect, OgreParticleLab, OgreProcedural, OpenSpace3D, Particle Universe MediaPack, Proun, QuickGUI, Spacescape, TopGunner, Zen Engine and ZeroGear.

With the so far most highly accredited game title using Ogre, Torchlight, exceeding the 750,000 sold units milestone and therefore probably making it the most widely spread Ogre application, our beloved rending engine showcased once more it massive power that will hopefully lead us in another bright year of 3D rendering.

Thanks to the new source code control system, a great Ogre Development team and our stunning administrators and moderators, we have no worries that Ogre will grow further in the upcoming year!

All the best, and have a Happy New Year!

The Ogre community

We arrived at this licensing decision in the last month, and decided to make the community aware of it in advance so you could incorporate it into your plans. After the jump there are more details of the reasoning for this decision, and  answers to some common questions.

We hope this announcement will be received positively by the community, and that the simpler licensing arrangements will provide even more incentive for people to get involved in using and extending OGRE in the future.

Why are we doing this?
The MIT license is short, easy to understand, requiring only that you include (simple) copyright & license declarations in your final applications. We hope using it will make it an even easier choice for people to use OGRE in their projects in future, thus driving even greater adoption of OGRE.

Won’t this mean people can ‘rip off’ OGRE in proprietary software?
The LGPL already allowed OGRE to be used in proprietary software, and this is something we’ve always encouraged. The main difference between the LGPL and the MIT License is that there is no requirement to release modified source code; only to include our copyright and the MIT license text in the final product.

While not requiring modified source to be released might initially seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to.

Does using a more permissive license weaken OGRE’s commitment to open source?

This is something of a political question. Here at OGRE we’ve always identified ourselves as ‘open source software’ rather than ‘free software’, reflecting that our primary purpose is to promote an open, active, participatory community around our shared code base. Our goal is not, and has never been, to require others to adopt the same licenses for their own software if they use OGRE – the LGPL has always been a ‘fire break’ to that, albeit quite a complex one. Our goal is to make OGRE the best it can be, and to encourage people to get involved in making it better and building ecosystems around it, and pragmatically we’ve decided the best way to do that is via a simpler, more permissive licensing approach based around voluntary contributions.

What does this mean for the OUL (the alternative commercial license to the LGPL)
The OUL will be phased out from 1.7 onwards. It will continue to apply for OGRE 1.6 and previous versions and will be available on request should people require it.

Can I apply the MIT License to OGRE 1.6 (or previous versions)?
No. OGRE 1.6 is licensed under the LGPL (with static link exclusion). The MIT License will only apply from OGRE 1.7 onwards – this is the clean break point between licensing conditions.