To his credit, in 2007 when John Riccitiello was CEO of EA, he was instrumental in supporting our successful campaign to relicense the original source code of SimCity Classic free under GPLv3 and bring it to the OLPC XO-1 children's computer.

EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative: https://ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2007/...

>REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 2007--Today Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) announced the company will donate the original SimCity™ -- the blockbuster 1989 game credited with giving rise to the city-building game genre -- to each computer in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. OLPC is a not-for-profit humanitarian effort to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptops with the goal of giving every child in the world access to modern education. By gifting SimCity onto each OLPC laptop, EA is providing users with an entertaining way to engage with computers as well as help develop decision-making skills while honing creativity. This is the first time a major video game publisher has gifted a game to the world.

Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...

>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.

>[...] The next chapter looks closely at the code to SimCity, which is possible only because it has been open sourced. There are few instances in which a company has open sourced the code to a commercial game, which makes the story of how this happened remarkable for a number of reasons. Recounting this story not only explains the provenance of my research materials, but reveals how social forces, in this case a heterogeneous collection of agents and agendas, shape software.

>[...] Surprisingly, Electronic Arts agreed to the arrangement. Their legal counsel, in consultation with Eben Moglen (Columbia Law Professor, general counsel to the FSF, and OLPC advisor), worked through the legal logistics. This effort was aided by Hopkins’s discovery and copying of the original Maxis/DUX licensing agreement, on a lark, while working on The Sims. Hopkins did the coding work of the conversion. EA executives approved of the endeavor, no doubt aided by Will Wright’s legendary persuasiveness and considerable prestige, not to mention the prestige of the OLPC project itself. [...]

Demo of SimCity on OLPC XO-1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKhh10K-j0

>OLPC SimCity Demo: A demonstration of OLPC SimCity running on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop.

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

>This license and distribution agreement (this "Agreement") is entered into as of September 4, 2007 (the “Effective Date”) by and between ELECTRONIC ARTS INC., a Delaware corporation with its principal offices at 209 Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, CA 94065-1175 (“EA”) and ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD ASSOCIATION, INC., a Delaware corporation, located at One Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA, 02142 ( “OLPC”).

Free SimCity Source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

>Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.