Hi.
As a long time DotA-Player who changed over to Linux not to long ago (using wine atm), i searched over a long time for a FLOSS AoS (this genre was labeled as "Arts" or "Moba" lately, but since both terms were coined by great companys monetizing the gameplay, i will use the term named after the very first map with this gameplay - Aeon of Strife). This turned out to be quite hard:
-I once found a thread in the megaglest-Forum featuring an AoS-like mod. It was howwever early in the development and seemed to be stopped in development.
-ZeroK, based on Spring offers an DotA mod. I didn't make out how to play it yet.
-Engines of War, based on Spring aswell, got the last update in December 2011
-DotC, transferring the gameplay of DotA into an egoshooter (=> beeing fairly far away from what i searched for) and named on the blog here seems to be inactive for 2 years as well.
-The possibility of a mod using 0 a.d. was discussed, and as far as i understand it, the engine would allow to create an AoS.
Other than that, you see mainly people who consider to create a FLOSS-AoS, but nobody seems to "make" it. The causes i can imagine for this:
-You need a more or less big playerbase for an AoS - for normal they are played 5v5(+2 bots), and many FLOSS-RTS-Games that support so many players online have either technical restrictions or a too small playerbase.
-Great Concurrence, as the market was flooded with F2P-AoS-Games.
-Great effort since you need to balance many elements.
-Correct my if i'm wrong: In comparsion, the genre seems to be rather unpopular amongst the Free-Software-Fans: Nearly all predecessors were mods for Proprietary RTS-Games without Linux support (while especially the grand Arena-Shooters did at least run under Linux - and since Quake even made their source public, we have many FLOSS Arena-Shooters).
-Need of some sort of (server) infrastructure
On the other side, many aspects of the AoS-Genre fit to aspects of FLOSS:
-As many FLOSS-Projects, AoS-Games tend to be never finished. It is a livelong process of polishing and extending the gameplay (in both cases, this is a thing i actually like).
-Very small changes have great effects, making the AoS-Genre a good target for Forks and Mods (to example: Gameplay, Gamelength, and avaible Strategys change with the nerfing or bufing of some values from version to version of DotA).
-A good part of the community is traditionally used to play the game as a mod.
-Traditionally, AoS players take part of the creative process of creation - many contents in DotA were suggested by the players. This "culture" fits the way of participation at FLOSS-Projects.
While i would love to create a FLOSS-AoS, i have to admit that i have neither the time (beeing a student in the area of pedagogy atm) and - more important - nor the skill (i even failed at my trials to create small 2d games using SDL until now) to create or even participate much in a project as complex as this would be, mainly at the very basic things (fitting an engine to the needs of an AoS-Game - graphic and networkwise, creating 3d or good 2d graphics that are imho a must in this area, and adding features such as items to an engine). Easy scripting stuff, balancement, and to some degree content creation are things that i could imagine me to do-
are there other people interested in the genre arround?