In early march 2009, Matthes Bender told the other developers of Clonk Rage that he wouldn't have any time to work on Clonk anymore. As the Game Designer of Clonk Rage and Directing Manager of RedWolf Design, the company selling the Clonk titles, he left a significant vacancy. The development of Clonk Rage was mostly done as a hobby by the other developers, and although they wanted to continue doing that, they felt that more contributors were needed. Thus it was decided to radically lower the barriers for new contributors by publishing the source code of the engine, allowing everyone to freely modify the source code and game content, and discuss the future directions in an open forum. It was also decided to drop a lot of the "old" game content and drop the backwards compatibility requirement. The goal is to encourage new people to participate, while allowing the Clonk Rage developers to continue working on at least some of the code they produced and are familiar with. There are also plans to continue the clonk.de league for registered players so that those who want can play in a supervised league.

That said, there is still some work to do before the source code can be published, but we hope that can be done soon.