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End of the Machinery Game Engine

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#41

Post by devd00d »

seanstrom wrote: post #36

For a moment I thought this was my fault because I had just asked for a free academic license, and somehow that would be the final straw :( I was very excited to start reading the C code and was hoping a Nim port would be possible. Sad to hear I’m this late to the party because now I can’t even enjoy the blog posts.

You dodged a bullet. Me too. I just started my 3D journey, dabbling with Godot, Three.js and Unity. If I had stumbled upon Machinery and decided to use, I would have been annoyed now.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#42

Post by 10987654321 »

devd00d wrote: post #40
faeranne wrote: post #12

I'm sorry, is this in any way legal? Did they just tell people to delete their games? Like... I'm pretty sure this kind of rug pull would destroy any company that relies on this engine. 14 days for a full re-write is insane.

I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed. I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood th…

Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game.

What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to the fork.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#43

Post by faeranne »

devd00d wrote: post #40
faeranne wrote: post #12

I'm sorry, is this in any way legal? Did they just tell people to delete their games? Like... I'm pretty sure this kind of rug pull would destroy any company that relies on this engine. 14 days for a full re-write is insane.

I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed. I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood th…

Godot is MIT licensed, and as such this 100% can't happen. Absolute worst case is they limit or remove future versions, but MIT basically means "mention that this was MIT licensed." Do that, and they can't stop you from doing anything with it. Repackage and resell it? sure. Wrap it in your own commercial project? Go for it. You just can't stop someone else from using the source code as originally released.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#44

Post by faeranne »

charcircuit wrote: post #4

So everyone's games using it will need to be taken down too? That is so strange.

Section 3.B of the EULA says no, but also that can be changed at any time, so possibly. I have a friend who released a game using Machine earlier this year, and they're scrambling right now to get a lawyer to look at this. Current opinion is that the 14 day limit means they can't work on it anymore, but current game binaries are free to remain online. They're already working to replace the engine, as they have no faith that 3.B won't be expunged as well.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#45

Post by ChadNauseam »

10987654321 wrote: post #42
devd00d wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed. I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood th…

Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game. What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to t…

Changing the license would be very difficult, AIUI they would need to convince everyone who had already contributed to consent to the change in licensing.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#46

Post by KronisLV »

> ...you are requested to delete The Machinery source code and binaries.

This is pretty weird.

Then again, in regards to the engine itself dying, I feel like this is inevitable for many of the projects out there. For example, there was the Xenko engine which was later renamed to Stride: https://www.stride3d.net/

It's actually a nice project, has lots of great features and feels like it should be a more open alternative to Unity, whilst being similarly easy to use. However, compare the attention it is getting in comparison to something like Godot:

  - https://github.com/stride3d/stride
  - https://github.com/godotengine/godot
On OpenCollective, Stride has an estimated annual budget of around 12k USD, whereas Godot gets around 15k USD per month on Patreon. Stride has a bit under 100 contributors, Godot has almost 2000. Godot gets hype on various game development subreddits regularly, yet Stride gets no such love.

Ergo, it's probably pretty easy to draw a trajectory of what the next 10 years might bring for either, with one probably getting more features and development and becoming a mainstay of the indie scene, when compared to the other.

But the great thing is that if whatever engine you use has an open license, you cannot have it be taken away from you (as long as you have all of the actual executables and don't depend on external services).

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#47

Post by anothernewdude »

jwitthuhn wrote: post #6

This looks pretty shady. The current EULA on the website includes a bit that says they can terminate your license and ask you to delete all source and binaries entirely at their discretion[1]. The latest copy on the wayback machine from May does not have that bit.[2] 1. https://ourmachinery.com/eula.html 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220529230958/https://ourmachin... So they used the 'we can update the eula at any…

So the EULA says that they can ask.

Re: End of the Machinery Game Engine

#48

Post by 10987654321 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #45
10987654321 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game. What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to t…

Changing the license would be very difficult, AIUI they would need to convince everyone who had already contributed to consent to the change in licensing.

Since Godot is MIT-licensed (which only requires a copyright notice and a note that says 'this is using code from a thing under the MIT license') changing the license would be trivial.

Essentially they could release "Godot current+1" under a fully proprietary (or GPL for that matter) license and keep the notice that's required by "Godot current" and they would be compliant, since "Godot current+1" would be a derived work from "Godot current".

The requirement to get consent from all previous contributors only applies if they would want to remove that copyright notice. For sofware that is under more restrictive licenses, like GPL, further restrictions apply and then it would be necessary to get an ok from all copyright holders to change the license to something that is incompatible with the GPL (or between incompatible GPL-versions, like GPLv2->GPLv3).

edit: While it would be ok to do this change from a licensing perspective it would of course most likely piss off quite a lot of the current contributors who didn't agree with the change, and they would most likely move to the aforementioned fork that would get started immediately.

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