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Report: Unity's Runtime Fee quietly gave exemptions in launch rush
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Godot is fantastic, it's where blender was in 2007-8 and it's super exciting.
It's nowhere near the same level as the contemporaries yet. You can't even build for console right now and have to hire third parties to port.
Keep in mind that the console makers likely don't want too much of their SDKs to become part of Godot's open codebase. They license it to publishers who promise them that they won't divulge important IP.
keep in mind that unreal engine is also open source. Epic just has a system where if you get the go-ahead from a console maker, and they can confirm that, then you get access to the parts of the engine that connect to the console SDK's
if you are an indie dev today, you can get the go-ahead from sony/nintendo/whoever and launch your UE/unity game on those platforms without much fuss. if you have a godot game you have to contact a third party porting house and ask them to port the game to those consoles. those companies have already made the godot hookups into platform specific SDK's but you still have to contact, and licence them to do this, if they accept working with you.
The problem is that Godot is FLOSS. Unreal is missing the free (as in freedom) and libre part.
kinda, its MIT so it's not free. I can, for example, change a bunch of godot. release my changes in binary only form and you can't demand the source from me. I mean you can but i've no legal compulsion to do that.
The Unreal Engine is not open source by any reasonable definition of open source. Being "source available" is not the same as open source, as you can't use the code whoever you like.
You have it reversed. The "source available is open source" argument is the more recent idea. Unless by "recent" you mean "in the last 30 years".
you can't use most open source code "however you like" either, they all have licenses. the main restriction with unreal engine is that you can't mix it with copyleft licenses and you can't use it commercially.
but you can do what most people want to do, modify, extend, fix, learn. that's the most relevant thing for what we are talking about here
Alright, sure my language was overly broad. "The licensing is restrictive in a way which makes it clearly not open source." would have been a better choice.
So, it's not open source.
That still doesn't make it open source, mainly because you are missing one of biggest aspects, distribution.
Open source != copyleft. That's free software if you want to go that route.
Also, you can distribute your version, of course you can. Both your changes and binary form. It's just all distributed under epics unreal engine licence
Are you sure?
So, you can only distribute source to people who are specifically licensed by Epic to use the source. That sure doesn't sound anything like "open source" to me.
you can only distribute your source under the licence of the source code, yes. just like copyleft licences. The whole concept of open source is demonstrably, flaky.
You want it to be a concept closer to free software, I say if the source is open, you can modify it and your changes are able to have an effect then it's open source.
I don't think we are going to resolve this. I would prefer if it was free software but that's not gonna happen for godot or unreal engine