It's sometimes a little mind-boggling that the FSF has been around only a couple months more than I have been around. I'm not even sure I'd have made computing of any kind a career if it hadn't been for free software myself.
Surely this is illegal? As a company why would you even want to know. What is an HR department going to do with this information?
The only use of this must be some kind of discrimination, right? Like "Oh you're in a same-sex relationship, remind us to not give you any time off if your partner goes to the hospital."
The non-creepy answer is that companies want to make sure they’re getting a diverse set of applicants and without asking they can’t find out. They’d want to track that in case they’re doing something unintentional or not that stops people from applying.
Whether this is the best way, should be allowed and so on is another thing though! In particular because it gives cover to people that would use it in a discriminatory manner.
Where Unity users pay to have the logo taken off of their splash screens, and Unreal forces it on successful titles Godot users love putting splash screens on, even though they don't have to.
It is retroactive, games that are already made today and already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.
10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.
Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.
Looks like you know a lot about F2P games, can you help me understand this fee in the context of other variables such as cost of customer acquisition? Is that usually a much lower amount than 20 cents? What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license, which most successful F2P devs would assuredly be able to afford?
I’m hoping you can answer these with concrete data. If that’s not possible, could you share your references?
> What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license,
2 cents with the pro-license only applies after the first 1M installs, tallied per month. If a game is under 100K installs per month, a pro license only lowers the install fee from 20 cents to 15.
You can access the source code to unreal engine when you get a license, but the terms are not by any stretch of the imagination open source. You wouldn't be able to freely share your modifications for instance.
You don't have to get a "license" (at least in the sense of paying anything), IIRC you just connect your EGS account to your Github account, accept an EULA (which technically is a "license" I guess) and then have read access to the Unreal Engine GH repositories.
(currently there seem to be around half a million users with access)
I'm hailing from an era where "getting a game engine license" involved several in-person meetings between top-level management of both companies, followed by multiple technical meetings between engineers from both companies, followed by exhaustive due diligence investigations from both sides, followed by intense haggling and shady backroom deals for several months, and finally signing a proper "contract", handing over absurd amounts of money upfront and then paying equally absurd amounts of royalties after release.
That's basically what I understand as "getting a license for a game engine" (this is also why Unity got popular in the first place, because they skipped all this nonsense).
OTH I accept probably 5..10 EULAs a week without thinking or even reading the text (most of them are not enforceable anyway).
AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. I remember that in Germany an EULA cannot prohibit reselling the software to somebody else, or making your own backup copy (kinda tricky nowadays though where everything is just a "service").
"AFAIK in Germany the TL;DR is that if there's anything in the EULA which violates "German Civil Code (BGB)", then either parts or all of the EULA are invalid. "
There is nothing unique about German law here. The same is true in the USA and most other countries. If a EULA or any other contract (whether agreed verbally, signed physically, digitally, or via a "click") violates the law, it can be considered invalid/unenforceable. It has nothing to do with how the agreement was agreed to, but with what the agreement contains. (There may be some legal theory that may carry some weight that a contract agreed to via a "click" is more likely to be unconscionable that one agreed to with a physical signature, but that does not automatically make all "click" agreements unenforceable.)
I was going to comment that it’s viewable by anyone on their GitHub, but you are correct: you have to be part of the Epic GitHub organisation to access the repo. Getting access is easy, but you do have to agree to their licensing terms to do so. So yes, what you said.
I used to work for Epic so I have some inside knowledge, but modifying the engine and sharing it with other licensees (via the UDN forum usually) Its actively encouraged too.
That's not possible with something that is open source. If it has a "dual license" that means you can pick which license to apply. You just pick the one that doesn't make you pay.
There are a number of projects doing this today with dual-license models(Permissive/Commercial). I'm not a lawyer and have no idea if they hold up in court/can be enforced but it absolutely is a thing today.
These are a little different. So these "dual licensed" products work like this:
You get a GPL version of the code, which is free and nobody can charge you for, ever.
If you want to use the software in a way that is not GPL compatible you can opt for the other, paid for, license.
This works in some cases, but in the case of Godot (assuming we were to do something like this) is the MIT license, which already gives you the rights to do whatever you want.
And even in the GPL case, if the other license terms became too odious you could simply switch to the GPL version, and not pay.
This is specific to GPL-style licences. You would have to meet the terms of the GPL anyway (i.e. provide your modified source code under the same licence).
The commercial licence is just an additional option for companies willing to pay to not adhere to the GPL terms.
There are certainly cases where maintainers have started licensing _new_ versions of a project under different, non-open source terms (Terraform, ElasticSearch etc.). But you're free to continue using any code that was released under the old licence.
There are some badly written licences which make it ambiguous whether the licence can be revoked in future (e.g. Wizards of the Coast with the OGL), but I have rarely seen this raised as a concern in a software context.
It might exist but open-core model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model ) is much more commmn. I went through QT project licensing FAQ and I still don't see any situation when I would be forced to pay for commercial license when creating commercial software. Some SO answers suggest that complying with LGPL is harder on mobile OSes. Anyway - if you release something on open license, you can't really limit its use, no matter how your second license is constructed. That is probably why paid add-ons are so popular.
You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them.
How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).
And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.
The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work.
One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...
While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line.
Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.
Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users.
An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)
