We first announced our plans to open source the Slife v2.x client right at the beginning of the Summer, around the same time that we released Slife Web. We were shooting for an end-of-August release but couldn’t meet that deadline.

The good news is, we only slipped for a couple of weeks. The new “old” Slife client is here, as open source and under the GPL license. We are very excited about this and wanted to share this announcement with you as soon as possible, even though it’s close to 6PM on a Friday here on the East Coast.

To be clear, this is the Slife v2.x client, the rich desktop client that precedes our current Slife web-based platform. And it’s the MacOS X version of the client. For the time being, we have no plans to open source the Windows client, since there was so little demand for it. We are calling this the Slife v2.5 client.

We decided to host the project under Google Code, a pretty good platform that has been recommended to us by lots of people. There’s not much there right now, except for the source code and the application as a zip file, but I am sure things are going to get busy as more people get involved and contribute to the project.

Over the years, like any other software company, we’ve benefitted tremendously from the generosity of others who’ve built and distributed software as open source. This is the first time we are giving back and we hope to do more of this in the future.

We are beginning to look more seriously at open source licenses for the Slife client. I was surprised to find so many options out there, many of which are listed on the Open Source Initiative site.

We are probably going with simplicity. The MIT license seems well suited for what we want to do. It’s also short and straightforward.