With the major controversy of Unity throwing game devs under the bus, a lot of people have been looking into moving to Godot. I'm writing this post from the ...
I made a blog post about my experience switching from Unity to Godot earlier this year, and some tips for Unity devs.
I recently realized that Unreal is Open-source. I’m curious why it doesn’t seem to get any love from the FOSS community? I would personnaly glady ditch unity, but I heavily rely on video tutorials for my very amateur projects . So I was actually moving to Unreal…
Unreal is “source available”, not Open Source. There’s a big difference. With any Open Source project you can legally fork the project, distribute your custom version of the code, create a community around your variant… “source available” has none of that. The Unreal EULA is more permissive than most game engine licenses (with the obvious exception of Godot) but it still comes with plenty of restrictions. For example:
You are permitted to post snippets of Engine Code, up to 30 lines of code in length, online in public forums for the sole purpose of discussing the content of the snippet or Distribute such snippets in connection with supporting patches and plug-ins for the Licensed Technology, so long as it is not for the purpose of enabling third parties without a license to the Engine Code to use or modify any Engine Code or to aggregate, recombine, or reconstruct any larger portion of the Engine Code.
I recently realized that Unreal is Open-source. I’m curious why it doesn’t seem to get any love from the FOSS community? I would personnaly glady ditch unity, but I heavily rely on video tutorials for my very amateur projects . So I was actually moving to Unreal…
As far as I know Unreal’s source code is available but the licensing isn’t, so the company still owns it and can still charge you for using it.
Unreal is “source available”, not Open Source. There’s a big difference. With any Open Source project you can legally fork the project, distribute your custom version of the code, create a community around your variant… “source available” has none of that. The Unreal EULA is more permissive than most game engine licenses (with the obvious exception of Godot) but it still comes with plenty of restrictions. For example:
Which pretty clearly does not satisfy the Open Source Definition.
That’s a really informative reply, it clarifys things for me. Thanks a lot!
Open source is not necessarily FOSS