- cross-posted to:
- godot@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- godot@programming.dev
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
Under that strict definition, software under the GNU GPL would not be "open source" because the license stays with the code, and is not truly "for any purpose," which is the same deal with the Epic license: you may use, study, change, and distribute the Unreal source code, but it stays under Epic's license.
If you are talking about the FREEDOM to fork and publish and share and whatever, then you mean Free software.
You are not allowed to distribute unreal source. From their FAQ:
Unreal Engine licensees are permitted to post engine code snippets (up to 30 lines) in a public forum, but only for the purpose of discussing the content of the snippet
But the code is easily visible and you can compile it yourself. If you say "I only run software I 100% knows what it does because I can read it's source code" then Unreal Engine fits, it's open source.
That's not why people want an open source game engine though, they want it to be open source so that they can't do a unity
I agree the phrase "open source" is a bit confusing
That has nothing to do with open source, that has to to with licensing, which I'm pretty sure isn't an issue anyway since I think Unreal versions are tied to specific license versions, i.e. if you download the engine under one term, thats the only one you have to use