Especially as they've just lost the FIFA licence, renaming the next football (soccer) games to "EA FC" as FIFA were asking for a billion for the licence to use their name.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/may/10/electronic-art...

Yes, hahaha me too. I clicked happy because I thought "yes, EA a big devil company who no release any game for Linux in their history, thanks karma".

But not.

Actually, EA released the source code and binary Linux version the original SimCity under GPL-3, which I ported to various Unix platforms including Linux and the OLPC.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...

>Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.

Granted, EA's QA folks had never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to walk them through installing VMWare on Windows and gave them a Linux operating system image to test it with, but it did pass QA, and they released it in binary on the OLPC as well as in source code form.

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

Here's the contract with all the legal details:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf

I figured it was either that or Early Access and its impact on development schedules, milestones, feedback, etc.