In fact, when I first started this project, I had called it "Tetr61s". This was because the game was at first supposed to be quite close to Tetris(c) and there's a letter in Russian which is pronounced "i" (like in "tetris") and when you write it down it looks like you have written 61.
Since the Tetris Company (www.tetris.com) claims to have a look-and-feel copyright on Tetris(c), and sues independant game programmers who program Tetris(c) like games, I could not call the game Tetr61s, nor make a plain Tetris(c) clone. So I decided to start a new project, more general, and change the name. So "U" is because my nickname is "U-Foot" and "61" is because it is the successor of "Tetr61s".
Yes, since the game is Free Software (free as in speech), protected by the GPL (GNU General Public License). You should have received a copy of the GPL with the game. For more informations on the GPL, check www.gnu.org.
SDL starts being a quite mature library, it's widespread, present in most GNU/Linux distributions, and used by professionnals such as Loki. Therefore, one might wonder why I chose ClanLib instead, knowing that it's much harder to install and also less common library than SDL.
I chose ClanLib because is a high-level programming library, and provides much more than SDL. Its main drawback is that it's still under developpement and therefore API changes occur a bit too often for me. But its big advantage is that it provides tons of usefull functions, and has a very clean design. I also like the idea that ClanLib is developped by independant programmers, just like me.
There are 2 answers to this question:
It's true that the source package for U61 is very big, even once it's been compressed. It's even bigger than the binaries...
The reason is relatively simple: I think - and this is also the FSF point of view - that the source package must reflect my developpement environment, and offer users who download it all the code, tools and ressources I use to compile the game. Therefore the source package is simply my whole developpement tree, so it contains *everything* and it's big.
You could argue that I could separate the C++ source code from graphics and such things but it would force me to have several source packages, and then I'd need to have some scripts to interract between these packages and it would make things more complicated. I did try it - previous versions of U61 used to have an u61 and an u61-data package - and it sucks.
You'll also notice that there are some unused extra graphics, sounds or scripts in the source tree. These are ressources I'm "likely to use" in further developpements, are which have been done and abandonned in the past, but are not bad enough to be thrown away. Again, I put *all* my U61 stuff in the source package.
Another good reason for doing that - besides making all my work freely available - is that everything I put in the source package is stored on a distant CVS server, this means that if my house burns and I loose all material things my work is not completely lost 8-)