King has opened up and relinquished ownership of the Defold game engine to bring more transparency to the development process.

Control of Defold will be transferred over to new software foundation called the Defold Foundation, which will take full ownership of the Defold product and services including the website, build servers, user forum, and social media channels. 

The engine source code has also been released under a special Defold license, described as a derivation of the "popular and permissive" Apache 2.0 license, which the Defold Foundation hopes will allow the community to become more involved in development. 

To ensure a smooth transition, members of the original Defold development team will be leaving King to work full time on Defold as part of the newly established foundation. 

Although King no longer owns Defold, the Candy Crush maker holds a seat on the Defold board and will continue to use the 2D game engine in "selected live games." 

"We are immensely proud to be able to open source Defold and we’re eager to start the journey as an open source game engine together with our great community of game developers building games using Defold," commented Bjorn Ritzl, product owner at the Defold Foundation.

"We would also wish to thank King for believing in our open source vision and entrusting Defold to the Defold Foundation." 

You can find out more about the game engine over on the Defold website, or take a gander at the source code itself on GitHub.

Update: Due to some confusion around this announcement, earlier versions of this story mistakenly stated that the Defold engine was being fully open-sourced.