I wrote a blog post in June 2014 talking about EA’s silent technology releases to http://gpl.ea.com, and what a shame it was that these releases were not publicized and celebrated, and made into a more usable form.

The code has been released publicly for several years, and anybody can doing whatever they like with the code as long as they comply with the licensing terms of the releases. I recently discovered, for example, that Paul Hodge created an EASTL fork nearly 4 years ago!

So with the help of Mahram Foadi, Kitsilano Software have done what EA should have done a very long time ago – created usable Github repos for these packages.

START HERE => https://github.com/kitsilanosoftware/EAWebKit

At the time of writing the repos only work for Win32 configurations, using the published SLN and VCXPROJ files with Visual Studio 2010 Express (with updated related paths assuming peer co-directories for all packages). It should be possible to extend that to Win64, PS4 and XBOX One, using the shipped content from http://gpl.ea.com, and perhaps to get them working for other platforms, like OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, unless critical content has been stripped from the packages. Generating the build files using CMake or premake is an obvious next step.

My challenge to EA in creating these releases is:

• Step up to the plate, EA!
• Build a community-friendly portal for these packages. Fork me back!
• Re-add the missing source code, documentation and changelogs
• Make these releases fully usable so that community members can contribute fixes and improvements

EA are only meeting their absolute bare-minimum legal requirements. They can and should do much more, in my opinion. I hope these repackaged releases help to kick-start that process. The PR benefits alone would make it worthwhile.

I could never achieve that aim as an employee. Perhaps I can do more to help with that now I am outside of EA?

Best wishes, former EA colleagues!

Bob “The Builder” Summerwill, 30th July 2014 (assisted by Mahram Foadi, another ex-EA-employee)