Comment by boarnoah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boarnoah | Hacker News Reader

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Hobbyist gamedev, kind of a concern to me too. There is no way to make such a project FOSS to any degree without treading on license obligations from the Engine or third party assets (most of which only allow redistribution within a clearly defined team).

A compromise I've seen (and what I do with my hobby projects) is to publish source code to github without a FOSS license, so at least the code I write has some value to others to look at, binary assets (including third party) are included in the project over git LFS so its possible to deny access to those by not providing LFS credentials.

An example along the lines is a project I follow a lot, the developer publishes their core gameplay mechanics code as MIT[1] and it's been very useful to me in a UE4 context (for things like understanding good practices re: building larger systems in UE4).

I guess I mean realistically impossible for you to release projects as FOSS but IMO there is still value if you can push any content you do have ownership to in an open way (at least for educational purposes for others).

1 - https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Core

Well, in theory, if you had used a free libre engine, you would not need to fear such a thing. That would have been an ahead of time consideration, when choosing your tools.

Whether or not you could have done what you have with a differently licensed software is a different question, which is about licensing of big companies and their ethics.

At hobbyist scale, it's usually more of a problem with assets rather than the engine itself, or with tools.

For example, in a game jam you might want to be able to push something to a public Git repo that anyone can pull from and build, and license it so people on the team have no question about whether they can share the code with other people. Easy way to do that is to have an agreement like, "Let's license our code under MIT and make the art CC BY 4.0. Agreed?" Then drop copies of the license text in the repo with everyone's name on it, and make the repo public.

As soon as you use third-party assets then you probably can't do that any more.

Just speaking from a practical perspective here... I'm working with people and want them to freely use the code that I've written and the assets I've made.

Yep, as far as I'm aware none of the larger engines UE4 or Unity mind if you release your source code under a non viral FOSS license.

But almost all third party assets have restrictions, it's not like the assets can have DRM to prevent the paid for asset being redistributed and used in other works.

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