Defold game engine source now available and free to use for commercial games

Re:Defold game engine source now available and free to use f... by m0llusk on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @08:05AM (#23233912)

Honestly, I think you are mistaken because of a lack of contextual knowledge. The reality of game engines are that if someone were to take this source code and make another game engine, editor, or both out of it with some significant change or added feature, then almost any such change would tend to propagate through the code base so as to make this clause useless. Take the scripting core, for example. Make that work with a different language, multiple languages, or different libraries. Now watch how that changes the code. It would actually take a large effort to preserve enough to make that clause apply.

What this is about is the potential for naive copies where someone takes the codebase and tries to make essentially the exact same product with no significant changes. That would be a source of confusion and competition and not really serve anyone.

It is great to be enthusiastic about open source, but objecting to people sharing source code is rarely a good idea. I openly challenge anyone to make a functioning, useful fork of this project that would leave enough in place for this clause to apply.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Defold game engine source now available and free to use f... by brainless on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @08:15AM (#23233973)

If you use standard, well known and industry accepted terms and then totally morph the meaning then it cripples the whole industry.

You are talking about game engines and their complexities, which makes it hard to comply. There are compliant full fledged operating systems out there (I am sure you have heard of a few) that are actually "open source". So I am not sure why any company should get away with using the well known term in a misleading way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Defold game engine source now available and free to use f... by m0llusk on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @08:29AM (#23234090)

You wish that these terms meant those things, but they do not. How is it that you come to speak for an industry? The source code is readily available and costs nothing. That is what open and free mean. Licensing is a different issue.

Let's talk about the operating system angle. When I went to work at NeXT in 1993 there was a lot of GPL code in the system. By 1999 as Mac OS X approached release there was a frantic effort to remove all GPL code in favor of BSD or Apache licensed alternatives or in some cases nothing at all was favorable. If Mac OS had continued to make use of GPL code and components that could have made a big difference to the whole software development community in a strategic sense. Instead this kind of zealotry resulted in barriers. Not only do you not have the control you imagine, but your ongoing efforts to draw these lines makes everything that much more difficult and unpleasant.

[ Parent | on HN ]