Creator Of Angry Birds’ Physics Engine Calls Out Rovio For Not Giving Him Credit

While they're at it they should probably toss Isaac Newton and von Neumann some credit, too. I mean, who did the real heavy lifting here?

And let me be the first to acknowledge all the authors of the floating-point math libraries that power the physics simulation that powers Angry Birds. Whoever you are: Nobody ever thinks of you, but I know how much work you did. Thanks.

Also, somewhere, probably in China, there is a crew of people who work long hours in a clean room, peering through microscopes, inspecting the tiny wire bonds on the RF multiplexers that will filter all those Angry Birds levels out of the ether and capture them onto our iPhones. Let me thank those people, many of whom are young and work very long hours, because I doubt that many of them will ever come to a tech conference and stand up to demand credit for their work, perhaps because they don't speak English well, and perhaps because they probably can't afford the tickets to the conference, but mostly because they're just too polite.

Meanwhile, what on earth should we expect the Rovio folks to do when some passive-aggressive person stands up in the middle of a crowd at a conference and claims to have written some underlying component of their product? Make the guy pull out his open-source license, put some lawyers on speakerphone, and adjudicate the thing right in the middle of the Q&A? Or are they just supposed to casually give credit to anyone who asks politely, without doing the necessary research first? Are software licenses supposed to be taken seriously or not? Do people not realize that copyright trolls and cranks exist?

Totally agree. I felt the same way for him when Crayon Physics became popular. Box2D is a fantastic library, and it felt a little unfair when Crayon Physics got on the news and didn't even mention him, even though the game was essentially a skin/sandbox over Box2D.

Granted, Angry Birds it much more than just a skin over Box2D, but the game wouldn't be what it is without a great physics engine, and they ought to give him credit.

If you want credit, put it in the license. Simple as that. You can't have it both ways. You can't claim popularity of your software due in part to the flexibility in the license and then complain about not getting credit later. While not likely, its possible that Rovio wouldn't have used the product if the license were more restrictive.

I have no reason to believe that Rovio didn't act in complete good faith.

And if this is an issue for him he should change the license right NOW. If the license isn't changed, this just seems opportunistic.

The thing that I object to is all too common: some really good developer makes something awesome, and then in a funk of false humility or whatever they think "no one would ever buy this" and then they think, welp, might as well just give it away for free.

It wasn't Angry Birds that devalued this guys contribution, he did it to himself.

Devaluing your programming contribution is an ebbing tide that lowers all boats.

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In a separate issue. people say that the Angry Birds guys should stump up some chump change, because they had this hit. What about their responsibility to their actual employees? Why should this one guy get a handout over and above what they have done?

Does the logic flow both ways? If they put out a game that flops (and remember they did some 40+ games before hitting on Angry Birds) can they ask for the developer of any free frameworks they used to chip in and help cover their expenses? Of course not, it is ridiculous.

If the obligation isn't bi-directional, my guess is that the logic claiming the obligation is flawed.

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Back in the dotcom bubble quite a few of the companies that hit it big gave Stallman free shares when they IPOed. Now RMS does a lot of strange things out of principle, and one of the more interesting things was that he would immediately sell those shares. Of course this was viewed as financially stupid, because he could have held onto them for a couple of months and got more, or a couple of years and got even more, or a couple of months more and got nothing. In retrospect it is a genius financial move, because he made money from it whereas a lot of people who went all in and then rode the bubble all the way till it popped lost everything.

But (amongst other things) what I think he was doing was stating basically that free software carries with it no such ties, there are no hidden strings saying "yes, have this and play with it, but if you hit it big I want some" - there was no obligation - and by rejecting the shares in that way he was making the point forcefully.

If you are the sort of person who wants attribution, there are licenses for that. If you license your stuff in a way that does not require attribution, don't complain when people don't. It is as simple as that.

This is more or less about developer's ethic. Users may not be aware of this issue but we developers do. To quote geohot on Sony lawsuit: "But talented developers are in much shorter supply, and take it from one personally, who you choose to code for is much more of a moral choice.".

If you look at Tiny Wings, it has a credit in the game for Box2D.

A modern iPhone game is built on a billion of little pieces - programming languages, frameworks, computer chips... It seems hardly practical to credit them all.

Also I don't think Angry Bird depends on Box 2D. They could have used any other engine or written their own.

I fully agree with you, but their lawyers may not.

Publicly acknowledging his contribution to their commercial success may be ground for a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Yes, he's never going to sue them. Yes, the open source license says that they could use the software for commercial purposes. But large companies get sued all the time, often settling when dealing with lawsuits with even less merit than this one would have. So lawyers may have cautioned the executives against making ceremonies for the engine's developer.

This doesn't mean that it's the best strategy. Lawyers often fail to understand PR issues. In this case, giving the guy credit is the right thing to do in order not to tarnish their image and deal with the issue in a mature manner.

Absolutely, and it also says that the company said "yep, come and talk to us about it".

So in essence: man asks for credit, company says happy to discuss it, more news as we have it.

It's a bit of a non-story really...

I've seen this comment every time a discussion about open source, and I think it is incredibly stupid to justify his complaints like this.

What does he have to complain about? That they followed his terms of use? I can complain about people using my stuff in the way I tell them to also, but that doesn't put me in the right.