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Comment by ipsum2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they open sourced it. Won't this create more mobile games, creating competition for them?

My guess is that is an step to discontinue the product. Defold has never been a big project inside the company. Candy Crush uses Fiction Factory, and the last time I heard about internal development, Unity was a growing technology. (If you live in Stockholm you can find a job as Unity architect at King).

So, instead of silently killing Defold a second life as an open source project seems more merciful for the people that internally believed in the project.

That makes sense. I wish Alphabet would do that with the projects they kill.

The question if Defold will be open sourced is one of the most common questions asked since Defold was launched in 2016.

By open sourcing Defold and handing it to the Defold Foundation we build trust with the community. It guarantees that Defold will be around regardless of what happens with King. And by handing over Defold to the Defold Foundation we believe it gives a lot of credibility to Defold as a strong and independent open source game engine.

I really do appreciate you making it available under such generous terms, but I fear you are wasting a lot of that credibility by calling it "open source" when it's not under an OSI-compliant license. This is something people feel very strongly about.

Thank you for the feedback. It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Please see this statement: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517

Please, I implore you, don't claim it to be open source. Call it "a very permissive licence", or "source available", but don't claim to be open source unless you actually are.

I love the release, I appreciate the time and effort, and I'm sure you have the best intentions, but the term "open source" has a very well defined meaning for very well defined reasons, and those reasons are hugely important to the last few decades of technological development. Please don't break the definition, even if you have the best of intentions!

Once again, thanks and congratulations on the release!

Thank you for the feedback. It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Please see this statement: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517

Thank you!

This fraud is successfully building animus in the community. It is,by definition, not open source. An open source license MUST allow any use, including commercial use.

I might be missing something, but:

> The license grants you the following permissions:

> - You are free to commercialise any software created using Defold

- https://defold.com/license/

Edit (after reading other comments): Ohh, derivative works of the Editor itself cannot be commercialized. Hmm.

Thank you for the feedback. It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Please see this statement: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517

I'm glad that for the twitter statement. The website is still misleading, though; I hope that will be corrected soon. I wish you the best!

It has been corrected now. https://defold.com/2020/05/20/Some-thoughts-on-the-open-sour...

You could always use it to create commercial games for free before it was open-sourced.

A developer from King explained why Defold is publicly available in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11364729

Reply on news.ycombinator.com