Sony announced today that its Authoring Tools Framework software is now available for developers to download and use for free under the Apache 2.0 open source license. The ATF is a set of software components, written in C#, that has been used to build tools for a variety of Sony first-party games, including Naughty Dog’s Last Of Us level editor and the sequence editor Guerrilla Games used to build multiple Killzone games. Sony claims the ATF has been in continuous development in Sony’s Worldwide Studios central tools group since 2006. Now that the tools have been released to the general development community, it seems likely that more independent developers will consider developing or porting games to PlayStation platforms. “We’re looking forward to expanding ATF’s usage beyond SCE, working more with external PlayStation developers and the larger game development community as a whole,” stated Ron Little, SCEA’s principal tools programmer, in a press release confirming the news. “Now that ATF is open source, we’re excited to see the ways developers use the toolset, which could expand beyond games.” You can download the ATF toolset right now from Github.