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After Canabalt goes open source, $2.99 clone Free Running hits the App Store

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After Canabalt goes open source, $2.99 clone Free Running hits the App Store

At the end of last year developer Semi Secret made its popular endless running game Canabalt 'open source'.

Why the inverted commas? Because it's not entirely open source. While the game engine is fair game, the game-specific elements – game code, art assets, music, and so on – are protected by Semi Secret's copyrights and trademarks.

In Semi Secret's own words, “What this likely means is that Canabalt itself is not "open source" in the strictest definition of the term, and it is certainly not "free" by any stretch of software activist imagination.”

In essence, Semi Secret is happy to share the means to make games with other indie developers, but it needs to make a living: “Canabalt still helps pay our monthly bills,” Semi Secret's Adam Saltsman writes on his blog, “and it would obviously suck to have somebody just put a free version of (sic) up on the App Store.”

Developer PLD has gone one worse. As spotted by Stu Dredge and reported in the iPhone Games Bulletin, its game Free Running is a clone of Canabalt – not in the sense that many Gameloft games are clones, but an actual clone - and it's not even free.

It hit the App Store this morning for free, but now costs 99c/59p. After today it'll go up to $2.99. After a couple more days, Apple will probably take it down.

If you buy it in the meantime, you're a sinner.

Click on the iTunes link below if you want to buy Canabalt.

Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.