Matchday debuted its new soccer digital card game Matchday Champions in early access today on iOS and Android.

Today, the game is in early access globally, and it is celebrating with the limited-time “Copa Alexia x Céline,” a unique in-game tournament hosted by Spanish football World Cup Champion Alexia Putellas, and the popular Belgian influencer Celine Dept.

Backed by Lionel Messi’s Play Time fund, Alexia Putellas, and other industry legends in sports and games, Matchday Champions said it has a one-of-its-kind experience. The game allows players to collect, craft
and manage their own dream squad made up of both men’s and women’s players.

Sebastien de Halleux, Matchday chief gaming officer, said in a press briefing that the company is going after five billion soccer (or, rather, “football”) fans in the world. It sounds ambitious, but in a previous life, de Halleux and his previous cofounder Kristian Segerstrale sold their social gaming company Playfish to Electronic Arts for up to $400 million back in 2009.

“Why are we doing this? Well, football, or soccer, is a force that’s bringing more people together than ever before. It is really something that is absolutely universal,” de Halleux said. It’s mind boggling. It’s actually one billion more than the number two sport, which is Cricket. And the best part of this is that it is the growing the football audience is estimated to have grown to five billion.”

De Halleux said, “Of course, video games is also growing and there are about 2.5 billion people playing. What is the commonality between football and video games? Both football and video games are fueled by emotions, and that is really the genesis of Matchday.”

“Football is an emotional experience for its five billion fans worldwide, and now they will be able to experience the drama of the sport in a video game that can seamlessly simulate games based on real players, real stats, and more,” said de Halleux. “Few players have experienced the emotional highs of football like Alexia Putellas, winning a World Cup, three UEFA Women’s Champion Leagues, and 21 domestic trophies, along with all of her incredible individual accolades, so we’re honored that she has joined us not only as a Matchday ambassador but as the host of our first global in-game tournament.”

He said it delivers the excitement of football using a cutting edge narrative creation engine, ensuring no two matches are ever the same. More than two million people have already pre-registered ahead of launch. Matchday Champions is now available in early access globally for iOS and Android phones.

The goal was also to make a single game for men and women, so one of the characteristics is you can put men or women athletes on the same team. Licensed by FIFA, the game includes 65,000 men and women athletes.

Players who download the game can sign up to participate in the Copa Alexia x Céline, beginning on September 20. Hosted by World Cup champion, two-time Ballon d’Or winner and UEFA Women’s Player
of the Year Alexia Putellas and influencer Celine Dept, a football mega-fan with more than 50 million
followers on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, Copa Alexia x Céline challenges players to join Team Alexia
or Team Celine, squaring off in a virtual tournament for bragging rights and prizes.

“Matchday is elevating two things I am very passionate about: women’s football and inclusivity,” said Putellas, in a statement. “Women’s football has been on the rise for the last decade and Matchday’s co-gender football squads represent this reality in a fun and novel way for fans. I am honored to be a part of and shape a (virtual) football world that gives men and women truly equal footing. I hope the sort of representation we see in Matchday’s games will inspire the women’s football stars and all football fans of tomorrow and help to drive forward conversations around equality.”

Licensed by FIFA and FIFPRO, Matchday offers fans the ability to collect digital player cards from tens of
thousands of soccer athletes, and to combine both men’s and women’s players into their ideal squad to
go head-to-head with other players’ teams. The FIFA license is interesting considering Electronic Arts dropped the license in favor of its EA Sports FC brand instead.

How to play

Matchday players begin by assembling their squad, which they can start upgrading immediately. They then send their starting 11 onto the pitch, and Matchday Champions’ proprietary simulation engine renders exciting in-game narratives.

You can play against rivals and friends while earning resources and recruiting footballers to improve their squad. Matchday Champions authentically captures the euphoria and heartbreak of real life football, and every match unfolds in a unique way.

The game lets you craft your Dream Squad. Your are the manager of your fantasy squad, and you get to choose who goes onto your team. You can put men and women on the same squad. The cards evolve over time as you accummulate more XP in the matches. Real-life stats influence how well a player does in the card game. If that player gets injured, you will see the impact in the game. You can put players on the squad that will complement each other, and the strategy is fairly easy to grasp.

This game has an AI-powered engine, and it dissects the game into 10 or so moments which are narrated and in your local language, with a lot of passion. And then each action is actually displayed using the cards themselves. Each card has special tricks.

“We try to take users through the reality of football, which is to the highs and the lows, and try to really connect your choices as you are building your squad to what’s happening on the pitch with some recommendation in the post match report,” de Halleux said.

Your goal is to lead your club to glory. You can play a game in two to five minutes. The game also has a lot of social elements. There’s a store that enables you to buy more cards, more packs, and a transfer window that highlights certain players during a week based on different events that are happening in the football season.

An accessible game

In Matchday Champions, players build and strengthen their squad, competing against others to move up
through divisions and grow their club, competing with friends and Matchday’s vibrant global community,
already numbering in the millions.

Custom squads can be set up with ease through Matchday Champions’ intuitive and accessible interface, allowing players to experiment with their team formation, as well as buy, sell and share cards with friends. Players hone their team in single player mode, then step on the pitch for a friendly match or an epic league competition with fans from all over the world. They can also join fans on the official Discord in discussing everything football, participate in weekly contests, participate in AMAs with football celebrities and follow real-world football matches.

Matchday continues to push the boundaries of digital ownership with Matchday Champions, which is part
of a new category of sports games wherein fans build virtual squads by collecting digital cards of their
favorite footballers. Players have true ownership of their cards and other digital items within Matchday
Champions as they collect, trade and grow their dream team. These officially licensed cards can be
utilized in all games within the Matchday ecosystem as it continues to grow.

Matchday previously launched the trivia and match prediction game Matchday Challenge: FIFA Women’s
World Cup AU∙NZ∙2023 Edition, which ran during FIFA Women’s World Cup and was played by millions
of players all over the world.

Matchday is incubated by Leo Messi’s Play Time and backed by leading investors, with teams in San Francisco and Barcelona.

De Halleux said that the company’s values including building distinctive soccer games, driven by people who are passionate about video games and soccer. They also focused on making the game “charmingly playful.” It’s not a hardcore game.

“We wanted to bring this joy back into the adult game. It’s about fantasy. It’s about having fun. We wanted the love of football, the love of game, to really shine through the experience. We wanted authenticity, which is really important.”

In addition to using licensed FIFA player likenesses, the team also used modern AI tools. The entire game engine is infused with AI. It’s also embracing Web3.

“We wanted to treat our gamers as true fans, and when they get to match the card, we wanted to put forward the concept of ownership, that all players own their cards forever,” he said.

He showed a demo of the gameplay where players like Messi square off against a goalie on a penalty kick. There’s some dramatic cheering and then the result of the penalty kick shows. There are animated scenes but it’s not a 3D or 2D action game.

“The esthetic is delightfully crafted and charmingly playful. And we are very, very proud about how this game looks and feel. We think it’s a completely different experience for football fans, one that they have not been able to experience before,” de Halleux said.

Messi incubated the idea and became an early investor and ambassador for the game through his fund called Playtime. The team is split across 22 countries.

Compared to rival hardcore soccer games, de Halleux said the “difference is that we are trying to address an audience that is not playing those games. We are trying to address an audience who is already passionate about football but isn’t hasn’t found the right casual football game that they can connect with.”

The company is a FIFA official licensed partner. The company previously launched a game that was available only for two weeks during the Women’s World Cup, and it was played by over two million people. It was called Matchday Challenge.

With the perennial tensions between proprietary and open source software (OSS) unlikely to end anytime soon, a $3 billion startup is throwing its weight behind a new licensing paradigm — one that’s designed to bridge the open and proprietary worlds, replete with new definition, terminology, and governance model.

Developer software company Sentry recently introduced a new license category dubbed “fair source.” Sentry is an initial adopter, as are some half dozen others, including GitButler, a developer tooling company from one of GitHub’s founders

The fair source concept is designed to help companies align themselves with the “open” software development sphere, without encroaching into existing licensing landscapes, be that open source, open core, or source-available, and while avoiding any negative associations that exist with “proprietary.”

However, fair source is also a response to the growing sense that open source isn’t working out commercially.

“Open source isn’t a business model — open source is a distribution model, it’s a software development model, primarily,” Chad Whitacre, Sentry’s head of open source, told TechCrunch. “And in fact, it places severe limits on what business models are available, because of the licensing terms.”

Sure, there are hugely successful open source projects, but they are generally components of larger proprietary products. Businesses that have flown the open source flag have mostly retreated to protect their hard work, moving either from fully permissive to a more restrictive “copyleft” license, as the likes of Element did last year and Grafana before it, or ditched open source altogether as HashiCorp did with Terraform.

“Most of the world’s software is still closed source,” Whitacre added. “Kubernetes is open source, but Google Search is closed. React is open source, but Facebook Newsfeed is closed. With fair source, we’re carving a space for companies to safely share not just these lower-level infrastructure components, but share access to their core product.”

Fair play

Sentry, an app performance monitoring platform that helps companies such as Microsoft and Disney detect and diagnose buggy software, was initially available under a permissive BSD 3-Clause open source license. But in 2019, the product transitioned to a business source license (BUSL), a more restrictive source-available license initially created by MariaDB. This move was to counter what co-founder and CTO David Cramer called “funded businesses plagiarizing or copying our work to directly compete with Sentry.”

Fast forward to last August, and Sentry announced that it was making a recently acquired developer tool called Codecov “open source.” This was to the chagrin of many, who questioned whether the company could really call it “open source” given that it was being released under BUSL — a license that isn’t compatible with the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) definition of “open source.”

Cramer swiftly issued an apology, of sorts, explaining that while it had erroneously used the descriptor, the BUSL license adheres to the spirit of what many open source licenses are about: Users can self-host and modify the code without paying the creator a dime. They just can’t commercialize the product as a competing service.

But the fact is, BUSL isn’t open source.

“We sort of stuck our foot in it, stirred the hornet’s next,” Whitacre said. “But it was during the debate that followed where we realized that we need a new term. Because we’re not proprietary; and clearly, the community does not accept that we’re open source. And we’re not open core, either.”

Those who follow the open source world know that terminology is everything, and Sentry is far from the first company to fall in its (mis)use of the established nomenclature. Nonetheless, the episode sparked Adam Jacob, CEO and co-founder of DevOps startup System Initiative, to challenge someone to develop a brand and manifesto to cover the type of licenses that Sentry wanted to align itself with — similar to what the OSI has been doing for the past quarter century with open source, but with a more commercially attractive gradient.

And that was what led Sentry to fair source.

For now, the main recommended fair source license is the Functional Source License (FSL), which Sentry itself launched last year as a simpler alternative to BUSL. However, BUSL itself has also now been designated fair source, as has another new Sentry-created license called the Fair Core License (FCL), both of which are included to support the needs of different projects.

Companies are welcome to submit their own license for consideration, though all fair source licenses should have three core stipulations: It [the code] should be publicly available to read; allow third parties to use, modify, and redistribute with “minimal restrictions“; and have a delayed open source publication (DOSP) stipulation, meaning it converts to a true open source license after a predefined period of time. With Sentry’s FSL license, that period is two years; for BUSL, the default period is four years.

The concept of “delaying” publication of source code under a true open source license is a key defining element of a fair source license, separating it from other models such as open core. The DOSP protects a company’s commercial interests in the short term, before the code becomes fully open source.

However, a definition that uses vague subjectives such as “minimal restrictions” can surely cause problems. What is meant by that, exactly, and what kinds of restrictions are acceptable?

“We just launched this a month ago — this is a long play,” Whitacre said. “Open source [the OSI definition] has been around for 25-plus years. So some of this is open for conversation; we want to see what emerges and pin it down over time.”

The flagship fair source license follows a similar path to that of “source available” licenses before it, insofar as it has noncompete stipulations that prohibit commercial use in competing products. This includes any product that offers “the same or substantially similar functionality” as the original software. And this is one of the core problems of such licenses, according to Thierry Carrez, general manager at the Open Infrastructure Foundation and board member at the Open Source Initiative: Much is open to interpretation and can be “legally fuzzy.”

“Fair source licenses are not open source licenses because the freedoms they grant do not apply to everyone; they discriminate based on legally fuzzy noncompete rules,” Carrez said. “So, widespread adoption of those licenses would not only create legal uncertainty, it would also significantly reduce innovation going forward.”

Moreover, Carrez added that there is nothing preventing the terms in fair source licenses from changing in the future, highlighting the problem of a license controlled by a single entity.

“There are two approaches to software development: You can have a proprietary approach, with a single entity producing the software and monetizing it; or you can have a commons approach, where an open ecosystem gathers around producing software and sharing the benefits of it,” Carrez said. “In the proprietary approach, nothing prevents the single copyright-holder from changing the terms of the deal going forward. So the exact terms of the license they happen to currently use do not matter as much as the trust you put in those companies to not change them.”

In many ways, fair source is simply an exercise in branding — one that allows companies to cherry-pick parts of an established open source ethos that they cherish, while getting to avoid calling themselves “proprietary” or some other variant.

Amanda Brock, CEO of U.K. open source advocacy body OpenUK, said that while it’s “great to see people simply being honest that [their software] is not open source,” she suggested that this new category of license might just complicate matters — particularly as there are already well-established names for this kind of software.

“We must shift thinking to consider three categories of software not two; OpenUK has been advocating for some time that we do this,” Brock told TechCrunch. “Within open source, we call the category that is proprietary with source that is public, as ‘source available’ or ‘public source.’ It is any code that makes [the] source [code] available, and which is distributed on a license that does not meet the open source definition.”

Git commit

Scott Chacon, who lays claim to being one of GitHub’s four founders and served as its chief information officer before his departure in 2016, launched a new Git-focused startup called GitButler at the start of 2023. He went through a whole gamut of licensing considerations, including fully proprietary, before settling on FSL and publicly proclaiming his support of the fair source movement.

“We are still somewhat unsure what our final business model will be, exactly, and want to retain our options,” Chacon told TechCrunch. “We know that if a company releases under an OSS license and then needs to relicense under something more restrictive in order to make their business work, there is an understandable outcry from the community.”

And that gets to the crux of the issue for many businesses today. Sure, everyone loves open source, but with all the backpedaling, startups today are hesitant to go all in and then risk the ire of the global community by having to change course.

“We liked the fact that it [BUSL / FSL-style license] is eventually open source, under an MIT license, but it gives us some air cover while we’re investing so heavily in it,” Chacon said. “We want to be able to protect our employees and our investors while giving our users as much access and freedom as possible.”

GitHub is actually a good jumping-off point for discussing the fair source movement. The Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform is central to open source software, and GitHub has open-sourced several of its own internal tools through the years. However, GitHub itself isn’t open source. Former GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner wrote about this very matter back in 2011, waxing lyrical about the virtues of open source while describing things that should be kept back. “Don’t open source anything that represents core business value,” he wrote.

And it’s this approach that Chacon is taking into his latest venture.

“My philosophy is to open source everything that you don’t mind, or even prefer, for your competitors to use,” he said. “I think that if fair source was a thing 15 years ago, we may have made the GitHub source public then under a license like that.”

Other businesses to join the early fair source fervor include YC-alum CodeCrafters; PowerSync; Ptah.sh; and Keygen, whose founder Zeke Gabrielse is actually partnering with Whitacre to handle governance around new fair source applications.

“Our governance at this point is scaled to the size of the initiative, so it’s myself and Zeke, our decision-making is public on GitHub, and anybody’s free to jump in,” Whitacre said, adding that there could be scope to set up independent oversight in the future — though it’s not a priority right now.

“We’re really just planting the seed, and seeing where it goes,” Whitacre said. “It’s a long play, so we’ll evolve the structure along the movement.”