Comment by richardboegli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardboegli | Hacker News Reader

Epic's Unreal Engine 4 team and the community around it is an amazing kind, supportive, friendly and talented group of people.

http://unrealengine.com/

Its one of the reasons I got back into game dev and chose to use this engine.

The engine itself is state-of-the-art and the improvements per each release is AWESOME.

As the engine is a commercial offering that is open source, there are a lot of people involved. This makes it easier for new people to get onboard. They twitch on a biweekly basis http://twitch.tv/unrealengine/

Have a look at the last two release notes for an example of what they get up too.

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-10-release...

If I recall correctly, 4.11 is more a stability release then feature release. It is the release currently being developed. Check out the Trello board to see what features are being developed where

https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap

I'd advise to sign up for an account, link your github account, have a look through and join the forums.

I've got the same account name on there if you have any questions.

Is Unreal Engine really open source? Doesn't look like it to me.

https://www.unrealengine.com/eula

Yes it is open source, but not libre / free. i.e: not GPL / BSD / MIT style etc...

If you want to view and modify the code you can.

So it is open in that sense.

I think the pithy phrase you were looking for was "It's open source, but not Free Software.". :)

Bingo, that is the concise version of what I was trying to say.

No, it is more like "The source code is available if you register but it is not Open Source and not Free Software".

Is the source code package you receive complete?

If it is, then you must remember that sending a snail-mail request to get a snail-mailed set of disks in return, and being required to send the money required to cover the cost of making a copy of the disks along with your request is a 100% permitted way to fulfil the source code distribution requirement of the GPLv2.

I haven't received the source code package and don't intend to do that.

The license on the Unreal Engine source code is not GPLv2, it is a EULA that does not meet the Open Source Definition.

https://www.unrealengine.com/eula https://opensource.org/osd

> The license on the Unreal Engine source code is not GPLv2...

I'm aware of that. I was making you aware that one of the canonical Free Software and Open Source licenses permits the source code provider to require requesters to use a rather inconvenient request method and cover the provider's actual duplication costs. This means that putting source code behind a free-of-charge authorization wall would still be 100% in compliance with the GPLv2's source code distribution requirement.

> ...it is a EULA that does not meet the Open Source Definition.

That doesn't make Unreal Engine closed source. Unreal Engine is open source. It just does not fit under the umbrella of ESR's Open Source philosophy.

Much ink was spilled decades ago about how shitty it was of ESR to name his philosophy in such a confusing way. I expect that we'll never be rid of the confusion.

It even got you confused! Notice how -in my reply to richardboegli- [0] I write "Free Software" with leading capitals (indicating that I mean libre software, rather than gratis software), but I do not write "open source" with leading capitals (indicating that I mean that the source code is available, but that it does not necessarily adhere to ESR's Open Source philosophy).

Make sense?

If my argument was not convincing, please do me the favor of answering the following question: "What is the English phrase that describes the opposite of 'closed source software', (that is, software whose source code is available for perusal, rather than software whose code is not)?".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10643807

Thanks for the explanations, that explains your GPLv2 post well.

As far as I know there is no phrase that describes software whose source code has been intentionally publicly released under a license that doesn't meet the OSD/etc. I definitely wouldn't take the lower-case "open source" as meaning that. Perhaps "proprietary public source code"?

> As far as I know there is no phrase that describes software whose source code has been intentionally publicly released under a license that doesn't meet the OSD/etc.

Were you -perhaps- born in the 1990's or later? As I remember it, "open source" was commonly used to describe programs that were not "closed source". Additionally, I expect that if we were to ask a few thousand native English speakers either "What is the opposite of closed?" or "What is closed's antonym?", the overwhelming majority of them would reply "open".

I get that you don't want to concede the point, and that you might feel that acknowledging the validity and reasonableness of my position would serve to weaken your own position. However -in truth- this strengthens your assertions, as it indicates that you've put thought and consideration into your positions, and -crucially- are willing to revise your view of the world when it becomes clear that your view doesn't match reality.

Twitter "loves" zealots. [0] Most reasonable people don't.

[0] Note that a zealot is different from a hard-liner. RMS is a hard-liner who has put a lot of thought and consideration into his positions. A member of $SOCIAL_MOVEMENT who primarily interacts with the movement by frothing about it on $SOCIAL_MEDIA is a zealot.

That doesn't sound like the open source that I know.

https://opensource.org/

Yep. ESR has opinions, and reasonable people disagree with them sometimes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com