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Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:17PM (#37649102)
Are open source tools banned on playstation and switch?
Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by cableshaft on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:25PM (#37649220)
Not banned, just that every build platform has to be supported and not every open source project prioritizes each platform.

Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms (that may change in the future now that they're getting a lot more support from the community after all this).

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by follower on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:41PM (#37649460)
> Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms

For the full nuanced details I've listed the relevant links here:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649430

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @05:03PM (#37650581)
That's a really useful comment, thank you!
Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:39PM (#37649434)
Gotcha, so it's not that open source isn't possible, the industry just needs to invest in community support for an engine
Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by ndiddy on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:45PM (#37649513)
The issue is that console SDKs are under NDA, meaning that open source tools can't target consoles because they would reveal details about the SDK. Some projects have workarounds for this, for example SDL maintains a private Switch port that you can get access to by emailing one of the maintainers with proof you're a Nintendo licensee.
Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by miohtama on Monday September 25, 2023 @04:38PM (#37650293)
There is no one open source, but various open source licenses.

Nintendo Switch and Playstation and titles from Sony and Nintendo incorporate BSD-licensed open source code, so it is obvious that “open source is banned” is not true. It’s only GPL and other viral licenses that lawyers argue is too risky, because it might require disclosing proprietary source when linked.

Same goes for Apple App Store as well

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12827624

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @05:06PM (#37650623)
Look at the other comments in this thread, the reason is more complicated than that. Open source tools might be fine but game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.
Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by JohnFen on Monday September 25, 2023 @06:26PM (#37651570)
> game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.

Technically, they could. It would require someone who hasn't actually licensed the SDK, and so aren't subjected to an NDA, to reverse-engineer things and produce their own implementation under an open source license.

Certainly would be an enormous project, but it is well within the realm of the possible. It's been done with complex systems before.

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @06:43PM (#37651745)
We're talking about a viable alternative to proprietary game engines.

Yes, I know it's possible to reverse engineer the consoles, but that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by JohnFen on Monday September 25, 2023 @06:45PM (#37651773)
> that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.

It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by amrocha on Monday September 25, 2023 @07:43PM (#37652323)
If it was a homebrew project then sure, but this isn't viable for commercial projects:

- The platform holders can and will ban software built without the official SDK

- You'd get delayed access to patches, which might break compatibility with new OS versions

- You're relying on someone being able to reverse engineer new versions for the life of the console. This is a rare skill.

It's like saying you can write your own C compiler. Yeah you can, but you wouldn't use it in production at your job.

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by JohnFen on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:42AM (#37660151)
> If it was a homebrew project then sure, but this isn't viable for commercial projects

None of your points appear insurmountable or showstoppers to me, to be honest, but they would require approaches to mitigate them.

Re:Unity's oldest community announces dissolution by Dylan16807 on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @03:21AM (#37655645)
The engine is already there. We're talking about alternatives to the console-specific shim layers.