There is actually open source game engine called Godot that licensed under standard MIT License. We should not let companies like Defold Foundation to mislead anyone to think their software product license is equal in terms of licensing.
> To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot has no legal structure to provide console ports.
> Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
(And for my personal take on the issue, I think Godot is working on these issues and I'm rooting for them. I also get frustrated with the false equivalence of source-available and open-source)
It's have nothing to do with licensing. MIT License that Godot licensed under is perfectly fine for keeping console support closed-source or source-available.
Problem is that Godot didn't have legal entity that can directly work with platform owners. This is why some of Godot maintaiers founded W4 Games and they're actively working on building console suport for all modern consoles:
https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-...
Of course console support will be commercial and closed source feature, but this is how it works for all game engines and have nothing to do with Godot specifically.
I disagree there. Licensing is still a huge issue with incorporating a console SDK. Each one plays by their own ball game, and it will take a tremendous amount of effort to work through the legal, business, and licensing issues for each platform. And once that's resolved, you'll still need to provide an avenue for end-users to obtain and hook up the SDK to the open source engine which sounds like quite the engineering effort to simplify it.
Edit: And it looks like Godot is pulling it off quite well, thank you for the link to their blog post
Godot is MIT licensed. Godot _can_ be used for console development—just like any other piece of MIT-licensed code you want to build your game with. It's just that doing so is (read: remains) an undertaking that you have to deal with on your own, since Godot Foundation doesn't offer anything besides the Godot engine source code under compatible license terms. There's nothing particular about Godot or its license here.
From the documentation you yourself linked to:
> Regardless of the engine used to create the game, the process to publish a game to a console platform is as follows: [painful and/or expensive and overall shitty process]
For posterity, here's Godot's post a year or so ago on the struggles they've had with console middleware over the years.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
> Q: Why don't you use the term Open Source when talking about the source code?
> A: The definition of the term Open Source is heavily debated. The Open Source Initiative has created a definition of the term Open Source where it must be possible to commercialise the source code. The Defold Foundation has made the decision to prevent commercialisation of the game engine and editor (the Game Engine Product). We want Defold to always be free to use! (You can of course still sell your games and plugins and you can modify the engine as much as you like).
Their foundation charter is interesting, too: https://defold.com/foundation/
Given the issues w/ Unity, I think this information is pertinent and welcome.
The important part is that if there's a problem, you can debug it yourself instead of staring at a binary blob.