The Humble Indie Bundle was an experiment that allowed people to pay whatever they wanted for 5 great indie games; specifically: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture. The deal has been extended by 4 days, so it is still available here. In the process over $1 Million dollars was raised by over 100,000 contributors, 4 of those games went open source, and we had lessons on game piracy and the importance of being cross-platform. So here’s a little snip from the Humble Indie Bundle website:
“The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 7 days, 118,959 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,082,698. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 30.95% to charity: $335,148 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity. I have made a page for the full breakdown including credit card fees in a JSON format here (json).
“Now it’s our turn to give back. As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source. We are preparing the sources right now and will be releasing them ASAP. We spent last night preparing Lugaru and it is available now. The code is still a little rough (no Visual Studio project yet, for instance) but hopefully with the help of the community we can rapidly make it more accessible to everyone.
“Note, the games will be “free as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’”: see each license for the full, finalized details as they come out very hopefully this week — stay tuned. It is the underlying code that will be made available to everyone.
“Feel free to continue donating to charity, to the developers, or any combination thereof below. We will still be distributing humble bundles to anyone who contributes.”
Here’s a few more essential links:
The open source goodness – UPDATED 6/3/10:
Twitter 
Delicious 
Digg 
Facebook 
StumbleUpon
