Ryzom MMORPG Released As Free Software

Ryzom, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), is being entirely open-sourced and even the artwork is going to be provided freely too. The Ryzom game is being put out under the GNU Affero GPL and the artwork is going under the Creative Commons.

Ryzom doesn't even yet have Linux or Mac OS X ports, but now that it's open-sourced, they are among the first projects to be tackled.

The announcement was made today via the Ryzom development log via the Paris-based Winch Gate Properties. The Free Software Foundation is very excited over this game going open-source (they even tipped us off to the pending announcement yesterday), and on the FSF blog they go as far as calling it, "This release is probably the single-biggest contribution to free software games yet."

There are a few shortcomings though with this Ryzom open-sourcing and that's the world data not being used on their servers is not being opened up and all of the 3D models right now are being created with proprietary tools -- though they are working to a point where they can start using open-source tools like Blender.