FlyByWire A32NX stops distribution on MSFS marketplace

FlyByWire A32NX is a very popular third-party add-on for Asobo's default Airbus A320neo aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator. While it is hosted on GitHub and distribution primarily took place on their own website and GitHub channel mentioned above, it was also available on the Microsoft Flight Simulator in-game marketplace, listed as freeware. However, it was removed a few months ago from the marketplace, as it turned out that there have been compatibility issues with Sim Update 5. Today, the team announced that their aircraft add-on will not return to the official in-game store.

Following the release of Sim Update 5, the A32NX was pulled from the marketplace due to compatibility issues in the stable version of the aircraft, requiring an additional fix. Although we have released a new stable version that addressed compatibility issues, we regret to inform the community that the A32NX will not be returning to the marketplace and will not be available on Xbox. The same will apply for the A380X.

However, not only compatibility issues have caused this decision. One more reason is that Microsoft does not permit GPL-licensed projects to be listed in the marketplace.

Chiefly, on July 4th, we changed the A32NX’s license from MIT back to GPL-3.0, following the overwhelming wishes of our development team and their commitment to free, open source software. However, due to legal concerns regarding copyleft licenses, Microsoft does not permit GPL-licensed projects to be listed in the marketplace. As a result we created a separate fork of the A32NX (dubbed the “marketplace edition”) with the MIT license necessary for marketplace compatibility. It became clear with recent updates, however, that maintaining this separate version as well as working around the marketplace’s release schedule would be a challenge. As new features were being introduced to the mainline version of the A32NX, many developers wished their code only to remain in that version, under the GPL license. This had the effect of making any code that built upon it increasingly difficult to port to the marketplace edition.

In their penultimate paragraph of their blog post, the team expresses criticism on the simulator's current SDK. It would "still lacks some key functionality", limiting the way they are able to work with the aircraft. Thus, the team is considering the possibility of running certain components of the aircraft outside the simulator - something that would also not be compatible with the marketplace at this time.

Anyway, FlyByWire Simulations A32NX is still distributed via GitHub, their homepage and comes with an handy installer, making it easy to install and update the aircraft with ease. For interested people, Flightsim.to is already hosting more than 1,000 A32NX liveries.