SDL 1.3 Mix In - OpenGL >= 3.0

[chronozphere]

I did some additional research and things might not be as bad as you picture them.

First of all, the FAQ states that:

What is included with the commercial license?
You get SDL under a commercial license that grants you the ability to statically link SDL with your application.

So you can still dynamicly link for free. Also:

Q: Do I really need the commercial license, even if I have a commercial game?
Absolutely not!

If you're building on platforms that support shared objects (e.g. Windows DLL, UNIX shared libraries, Mac OS X frameworks), then you can just link with the shared library and include a README mentioning that you use SDL and where it can be updated and you're done.

If you're building on an embedded platform that doesn't support shared objects (e.g. Nintendo DS) or they are prohibited by the vendor's license (e.g. iPhone) then you can link with SDL statically and then provide your source to your customers so they can rebuild your application with a customized SDL library.

However, if you would like the comfort of a solid company backing the product, or would like to statically link SDL into your application and don't want to release the source, then the commercial license is the one for you.

So indie dev is perfeclty possible. Dynamicly link for free or staticly link and provide the SDL source. The license is only for those who need official support or want to make their own closed changes to the lib.

And most importantly:

Can I evaluate SDL for free before buying a license?
Yes!

The commercially licensed version and the open source versions of SDL are exactly the same. You can evaluate SDL for as long as you want during development, the only limitation is that you must obtain a license before releasing your product to the public.

The current PRE-RELEASE snapshot of SDL 1.3 can be downloaded here.

So we all get the good stuff.