From The Blog: There’s BIG open source news on our 9th birthday

Getting Started Announcements
#1

Ten years ago, two guys got together with a goal to change the mobile development world. A year later, Corona SDK was born.

My, how time has flown!

Since those first days, we’ve frequently seen developers reach the #1 spot in various app stores. We’ve seen apps that have received millions of downloads, and app developers who have made a full time career out of mobile app development. But for many, it’s also a challenging time. The mobile app market has become over saturated. There has been a race-to-the-bottom in app pricing. New challenges extend up the development toolchain and impact the quality of top app engines.

In this evolving industry landscape and these emerging challenges, change is good and necessary. With that in mind, we would like to introduce a big change for Corona. We have decided to get you — the developer community — more involved in Corona’s development, and open-source most of the engine. There are features you want, updates you need, and it’s simply time to get you more involved in Corona’s future. Corona Labs will continue to support the engine and going open source means more transparency to the process.

We are certain you will have a lot of questions about how this will work, and as we have more to share, we will be continuously sharing new details with you. Also, feel free to discuss this in our community forums and in the CDN Slack.

We’d like to assure you that our goal is to increase transparency by enabling access to the source, and allowing each and every one of you to add your unique contributions to Corona’s future.

Any media questions should be directed to the Corona Labs Developer Relations team at devrel@coronalabs.com.

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#2

I’m all for this, but is there any assurances that the Corona team will still be internally active on the engine?
Is there still going to be a roadmap of features implemented by the internal team? 
Without that, I’m concerned for the future of a cohesive Corona feature set for users, old and new. 

#3

I’m a huge, huge advocate of open source. I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for about 15 years and my primary operating system for about a decade has been Gentoo. I believe in copyleft licenses, and that open source software is built with more love and passion than commercial alternatives.

But i have to admit, for me, I do feel Corona in its current format is exactly where it should be. If the framework goes open source and the community is able to upstream core features, does this not render the purpose of the marketplace somewhat obselete?

#4

I’m also worried about the future of Corona. Will we still have a stable core that’s worked on and be compatible with the latest iOS/Android store requirements? I’ve loved that Corona has always been pretty rock stable and bug free. I’d want to know that going forward, we can still expect some official support to maintain the core of Corona.

On the other hand, hopefully this really expands Corona SDK and its functionality!

#5

Some time ago I was waiting for something like that, and my fear is coming true … for me this is not good news … The reading seems like a farewell letter instead of an announcement. I have seen in Facebook groups great developers selling their applications and games and they do not say it, but, I have an 80% certainty that they were made in Corona SDK. I’ve seen a lot of inactivity by many users in the forum. Draw your own conclusions. Success!

#6

I really hope that this turns out to be a positive something that helps the community grow.

But I understand and share peoples worries.

#7

Please don’t jump to conclusions.

When Appodeal acquired Corona in March of 2017, we stated that we would be making this move. See:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/16/appodeal-acquires-corona-labs/

https://blog.appodeal.com/appodeal-acquires-corona-labs/

This has been a 4Q2018 Roadmap item for at least a year. We are just making good on our promise. Many developers want to use open source engines. Many of the game engines you can use today make the engine source available to developers to customize.

There are a bunch of feature requests that you want us to add that just never seem to bubble up to the top of our priority queue. Once we work out the details you will be able to find the things that are important to you and help the community by contributing to Corona.

We have started the process, which is going to require a lot of work from our side. For now, we are using this forum post, and the #opensource channel on the community Slack channel to find out what questions you’re asking so we can populate our FAQ better. So ask away.

Rob

#8

Hey, I’m enthousiastic about this! Cool move, and thanks for pointing out that this is a well-prepared tactical move.

p.s. I’ve been responsible for very critical posts in the past, each time Corona changed hands, but in the end I have to admit we’re still here, and still with an ever more robust product.

#9

Hey congrats!

I really don’t have too much an idea what this means. I don’t even do Native builds.(should i learn that?) But if it was what the community wanted then that’s great! 

#10

I’m still not sure if that’s a good move or bad but I hope this is the move that will carry Corona to more birthday celebrations.

(I’ve been around for more than 6 years and this is my first time the birthday being mentioned. Happy birthday for all those past years :))

#11

@Lava Level, hopefully, if you do simulator only builds and you don’t want to contribute to enhance the engine, then you shouldn’t see much in the way of changes. 

Rob

#12

Rob, when can we expect to see the 2019 Roadmap?

#13

Thanks for clearing this up a bit … so it’s kind of “business as usual” with the added benefit that we may be able to help adding/improving features or fixing bugs.

#14

@tylerthedesigner, this move to open source is going to consume a lot of our resources and we are still working out details on how features will be added going forward. Since we want the community to be more involved in the enhancement of the product, I’m certain the community will have different ideas on what they want to add or change going forward. It may be a couple of months before we can formalize a roadmap.

Rob

#15

Does that mean you’ll rely on the community for most of the new features?

#16

What about the 2018 roadmap guys - there are lots of unfinished/not started items on there?

Particularly important (for me and I assume other game devs) is Switch support. 

Can you please explain where we are with the current roadmap and when/if the items will be delivered by Corona.

https://coronalabs.com/roadmap/

I think knowing where we are currently will help us plan better for a (potentially) troubled future.

#17

@bgmadclown, I have no way to predict how much community involvement there will be, so I can’t really answer that.

@sgs, I’ll see if I can get that list updated. 

#18

Already have a correct date for this change? how will the question of paid plugins be? for example the splash screen?

#19

Seems OK to me.  If this in any way helps me pin down a bug that is in Corona and not my code, and then send back some patch to Corona, I’m all in.  Or, if it helps me discover why my code is wrong and needs to be changed, that’s good for the Corona support team because now I’m not consuming their resources by opening support tickets.

Cheers.  :slight_smile:

#20

@Rob do you expect to close any support tickets unaddressed simply because they may be out of scope for the internal team? If that is a possibility, will there be a GitHub style ticket system for the community?