Fenris Creations has open sourced the Carbon engine behind EVE Online under the MIT License, allowing commercial use while inviting community contributions, transparent security reviews and future open source AI tooling.
Fenris Creations has officially open sourced Carbon, the 23-year-old game engine behind EVE Online, making the technology publicly available on GitHub after first announcing its plans in 2024. Released primarily under the MIT License, Carbon can now be inspected, modified, redistributed, forked and used to build commercial games, including entirely new MMOs. The spatial audio clustering module is licensed under Apache License 2.0, while the IO module uses the Python Software Foundation License.
The company said the move is intended to promote transparency, strengthen community trust, encourage external innovation and accelerate development through open collaboration rather than monetisation. Community developers have already begun submitting GitHub pull requests, including security fixes, while others are discussing new web applications and tools for the EVE ecosystem.
“We wanted to get the code out there for inspectability and building trust with the community,” said Ben Hunter, Senior Development Director for Core Technology at Fenris Creations.
Hunter added that open sourcing should strengthen security through wider code review, noting that vulnerabilities already existed and external contributors can help identify and fix them faster. He also said surprisingly few security-related pull requests have been received, crediting Carbon’s 23 years of battle-hardening.
Fenris has introduced contribution guidelines, testing requirements and governance processes, while requiring contributors to disclose any LLM-generated code for additional review. Following discussions with the Godot community, the company is also adopting a plugin architecture and plans to release more open source tooling, including its internal AI gateway, as it continues developing Carbon in the open.
