The Defold Foundation

The Defold Foundation is the owner of the free to use, source available, game engine Defold. Learn about the foundation objectives and get to know the foundation board members.

About

The Defold Foundation is the owner of the free to use, source available, game engine Defold. The foundation works together with industry partners to provide developer-friendly software and services to game developers across the globe. The foundation was created in May 2020 and is registered in Stockholm, Sweden.

Objectives

The objectives of the foundation are:

Make the Defold software available to the public.
Make the Defold source code available free of charge to a third-party.
Manage the Defold software through updates, modifications, development and support.
Prevent the Defold software from being commercialised by a third-party.
Support the open source community and the use of open licenses.

As a registered Swedish foundation the Defold Foundation has a legal status somewhat similar to traditional corporation. One key difference from a corporation is that the objectives of the foundation cannot be changed once the foundation has been created. The objectives defined by the founder are protected by Swedish foundation law. A violation of the foundation objectives may lead to the dissolution of the foundation and the rights to Defold returning to the founder.

Vision

We believe in a free and open internet where software and services use open standards to bring net neutrality and democracy to everyone. The Defold Foundation works together with industry partners to provide free and open software and services to game developers across the globe.

Board

Sara Cederberg

Sara is a creative and hands-on solution finder with strong focus on improvement and quality. She has solid experience within business analysis and process development, digital product development and Business Intelligence. Sara has worked as project manager, product owner and director for Defold from 2016 to 2020. She is now a manager working with shared tech at Spotify.

sara@defold.se

Romain Sididris

Romain started as a developer and one of the founders of Virtools middleware back in 1996, bringing fast prototyping and creation tools to the game industry. Passionate about creating optimized engines and tools, he had the chance to see them used in many games, interactive setups and virtual reality applications in many markets and platforms. He is a strong believer in innovative engines and tools as key to unlock the creative potential in content creators. He joined Gameloft as CTO in 2011 where he started focusing on mobiles games before joining King in 2014 where he is now working as director of engines.

romain@defold.se

Mathias Westerdahl

Mathias has been in the industry since 2001 when he started programming racing games for the PlayStation 1. From there he moved on to tools and engine programming, most notably at Avalanche Studios where he spent a decade working as a developer as well as a team lead on AAA titles such as Just Cause and Mad Max. Mathias has spent the last four years at King working with Defold as a principal engineer and lead engine developer, making the game engine accessible to a wide range of indie developers. Mathias is now working full time on Defold on behalf of the Defold Foundation.

mathias@defold.se

Björn Ritzl

Björn has worked as a developer for almost two decades, primarily in the games industry, and even longer as a hobbyist writing his first lines of code on a C64 in the late 80s. He has worked with mobile game development since before smart phones and he is a big fan of old school games from the days of the C64 and Amiga. Björn started working with Defold at King in 2015, initially as a developer and transitioning into the role of product owner in 2018. He is a strong believer in the power of open source development with more than 100 open source projects on GitHub. Björn is now working full time on Defold on behalf of the Defold Foundation. Björn is also the current chairperson of the Defold Foundation.

bjorn@defold.se

+46-704-335333

Support the foundation

The Defold Foundation invites individuals and corporations to support the objectives and vision of the foundation through community donations and corporate partnerships.

Support the foundation!