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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

RoboVM has been free for libgdx users. Xanarin is disliked by independent developers for its pricing structure. Will RoboVM remain free to use? I hope so

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"If you haven’t already, please make sure to start your 30 day free trial of RoboVM to get a license key which now is required in order to use RoboVM."

https://robovm.com/robovm-1-9-released/

The open source version remains on their GitHub page here: https://github.com/robovm/robovm

libGDX and PlayN folks get a free license with debugger support for commercial and non-commercial games.

Thanks badlogic. Can you provide any details about why libGDX gets special treatment? I'm curious

Because our libGDX community had a bog impact on RoboVM over the past year.

badlogic, I can't reply to a comment thread going as deep as your last comment. Did Xamarin specifically put in the acquisition that it will remain free for libGDX developers? Because my faith in Xamarin is not high that they won't remove free integration with RoboVM, as Xamarin loves charging developers high prices, and thus me developing games using libGDX and RoboVM becomes a risky decision.

It will stay free for libGDX folks.

Some components are open source. So as long as you don't need the Interface Builder or Eclipse/IntelliJ support, it'll still be free. They did raise prices though.

This is no longer true going forward. You must pay to use the newer versions at all; the RoboVM github repository hasn't been updated since early September and will no longer be developed.

>Xanarin is disliked by independent developers for its pricing structure.

Define "independent developers". Because a lot of them do use Xamarin.

Read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7954406 if you like.

A lot of people are vocal about the price, use it or not; you can't pretend it's not true.

It's a pretty common trend for people to complain about prices period though on hn (I've seen people people complain about Intellij and it's pretty reasonable IMHO).

However, I do think their asking price for the edition that lets you use Visual Studio is a bit steep (I also pay for it, but still think it's kind of high).

Xamarin is IMHO the best cross-platform SDK, but I wouldn't recommend it, or any cross-platform SDK, to indie devs unless that dev's background is in C# and they really really want to keep using C# AND they know what they want a cross-platform SDK for. It's best for shops with several C# devs.

The official RoboVM page doesn't mention anymore the free option. They have some open source (at least for now) code on Github and you can fork it if you wish.

As the copyright holder RoboVM (or Xamarin) can chose at any time to close source the code and change the license for new versions.

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