Get 0.A.D For Free! (Historical RTS Real Time Strategy Role Playing Strategy War Combat Game)

Popular cover boxes for 0 A.D. on eBay

0 A.D. is an epic free and open source real-time strategy game.

Download 0 A.D. For Free Here
Download for Mac OS X and Linux.

You don't have to pay for 0 A.D. These downloads are completely legal.

About this post

As explained in a recent news post by the 0 A.D. team, You Do Not Need to Buy 0 A.D. on eBay.

It would be ideal if the teams behind open source projects would have people working on selling the game in an ethical way that would support their work and the people working on the project.

Ethical would for example mean that it would be clearly stated that the game can be downloaded for free, what kind of physical box to expect (if at all, I remember that SuperTuxKart would often be sold as a "digital download" product) and laying out the distribution of income transparently. This would turn the purchase into a donation (whether that is an acceptable word to describe it needs to be checked with eBay terms) and there are likely to still be buyers that don't have the skills or time to read the text or double-check the freeware status of the game or only look at the screenshots.

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Summer of Code: Earn Money Developing Open Source Games

Matt Raykowski, aka sfb, is a community herder for the Ryzom Core project and Summer of Code mentor.

Some people may not be familiar with Google's Summer of Code. Annually Google hosts two programs: Summer of Code and Code In. Google Code In (aka GCI) is a contest for 13-18 year olds to engage them in open source that features a variety of tasks and projects for them to complete for points. Google Summer of Code (aka SoC or GSoC) is a program to encourage college students to participate in open source development. It is a 3 month long project that pays USD$2500 per evaluation period - there is a mid-term and final evaluation. You can find a detailed timeline on their site and a complete list of organizations. The student application period begins on March 26th, 2012 and ends on April 6th, 2012. The actual programming portion of the project is between May 21st, 2012 and August 20th, 2012.

In years past Google hasn't given a lot of love to open source games in its Summer of Code program. There have been a small handful of projects which have participated year after year but the selection was pretty limited. Beginning last year they opened the proverbial flood games for participating projects and we saw a number of new open source game and game-related projects become accepted which is very exciting.

Listed below are open source games, game engines or tools frequently used by game projects that have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2012. If you are a college student looking to "flip bits not burgers" this summer and are interested in game development now is your chance to contribute to an open source game-related project and get paid (USD$5000) for doing so!

Open Source Games

• Battle for Wesnoth
• Hedge Wars
• Unknown Horizons (includes FIFE)

Open Source Engines

• Crystal Space (includes DAMN)
• OGRE3D
• ScummVM
• WorldForge, CEGUI and Ryzom Core
• PySoy (under the Python Software Foundation)

Open Source Tools

• Blender Foundation
• Inkscape
• Outercurve Foundation (see CoApp)
• GIMP

If I missed a project you think should be on this list just let me know!

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