Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.

>> While Unreal engine currently does not have terms like Unity’s, there’s nothing stopping them from doing something similar. In fact if Unity manages to get away with this it seems likely they will follow suit.

Unreal has licenses which allow you to use one version of their engine FOREVER and they cannot revoke that license. So the author didn't fully research this. It is true that for NEWER version Epic can change this.

Tim Sweeney explicitly mentioned this often + the fact that they are trying to break the Gplay/Apply monopoly shows that the Epic games leadership are not corporate piranhas like Unity's.

But what about Godot? He says as if "it's open source so no issue". Yeah but what if the devs stop supporting it? This "community will continue to work on it" is BS: in reality it's usually one or two guys who actually do the actual work.

So if Godot devs stop working on it you're stuck with a project with zero support. Good luck developing it further instead of focusing on your game.

The same goes for his very own product.

You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine.

For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now.

What is the difference between Epic not working on a game engine you use or an open source project not working on a game engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.

The problem is today everything has ToS, you get a ToS update in the email and if you do not like it you have to stop using the product, and lot of software this days require an account , and has online features or requirements.

I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported but they had to f** things up s the games won't work.

I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.

It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about.

_Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-compliant and release their source code.

And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases to something you won't like, cutting you off from your necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.