Hacker News Reader

Comment by TMM2K | Hacker News Reader

You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine.

For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now.

What is the difference between Epic not working on a game engine you use or an open source project not working on a game engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.

View on HN

> Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.

let me play the devil's advocate - unreal's source is available (despite it not being actual opensource licensed). This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes (except perhaps the run-time? Not quite sure how unreal engine and the runtime are licensed).

Source available means you cant do shit at the end of the day before going in legal trouble

Except you can because of unreal’s perpetual license. You’d just have to use the same pricing attached to the version of source you use

If you'd amended the source, then it wouldn't be the same version and the license would be invalid. If you want to use the perpetual license, you can't do anything with the source.

Except that is what the Unreal Engine license allows you to do

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

> 2. How You Can Use the Licensed Technology

> Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the “License”). This means that as long as you are not violating this Agreement or applicable law, you can privately use the Licensed Technology however you want. If you want to share the Licensed Technology or anything you make with it, Sections 3 and 4 below address when and how you can do that.

In section 3/4 it goes to that you can compile your game and give the output to outsiders if you pay the roylaties when applicable or share them royalty free on epics github (basically you make a pr to merge your stuff upstream) or on unreal marketplace (sell it)

Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that.

The additional sections that allow distribution are the important bits and I guess the devil is in the details.

The point is that if you're a game company. You have a way to legally make modifications to the engine even if Epic goes belly up.

No you cant.

Who could stop you and how would they know about it?

> Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that.

You do need a license to modify the source, use it internally, and then sell a binary you've produced with the modified source.

It's the "sell a binary" bit that introduces the need for a license.

Why is there so much misinformation around this. None of what you said is true.

Possibly because people like you respond with no actual information in your post that people could learn from?

I am less impressed with the defensiveness you're responding with when ignorance is pointed out than I am with the people pointing out the ignorance.

I'm not intending to be defensive (I'm sure there's loads of people on here with more knowledge about licensing terms), but usually a corrective post is something that we can learn from. Just saying something is wrong with no more info seems against the spirit of HN.

Misinformation is more against the spirit.

Well misinformation wasn't my intention.

If unreal decides to abandon all older versions support and development, to just focus on something new that requires payment, I don't think you can keep fixing or updating the old unsupported code, even if you have the source

Yes you can.

You just can't redistribute the source to anyone else but using it internally for your own projects to build executable that you share (and sell as long as you pay the royalties to Epic) is fine.

The last UE3 game released in 2021. UE4 came out in 2014 and UE5 in 2020.

Unreal Engine license are per engine version and perpetual. This is something Sweeney has been pointing out for years. And again a few days ago when Unity started this shit storm. And as Sweeney points out the big studios/publishers usually negotiate even better terms.

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/170161922085161792...

Yes you can. But unless you're a AAA developer studio, it's ridiculously infeasible. At least for Godot, there would be a community effort to maintain it. Such a community would be impossible with any closed-source (even if readable) engine.

In general one very rarely upgrade engines after release. Even during development you usually don't upgrade if there isn't a new feature in the new version you really need.

Really it is only an issue for new projects and at that point if the license of the newest version is not to your liking pick a different engine.

Also the last UE3 game I know of (Them and Us in 2021) was made by a small indie studio not some big AAA studio with massive publishers backing. At that point the engine had been in "end of life" state for 5+ years.

>This means if Epic ever abandons unreal, you could theoretically also just make the changes you need to support whatever your project required - as long as you didn't distribute those changes

No it doesn't, you still don't own the code so you can't just modify it and use it to develop games.

Except you can modify it and use it to develop games, it's licensed that way

Completely, wrong. That is the entire reason why the source is available in Unreal. To allow you to modify it and make games.

IANAL but I am fairly certain you are legally allowed to modify the source code of proprietary software and use that modified version, so long as you do not distribute it (as you couldn't distribute the unmodified version either).

The key difference between proprietary and Free Software is not actually that you can or cannot modify the source, it's that you are guaranteed access to the source in order to modify it or not. Since you usually cannot access the source of proprietary software, you usually have no legal way to modify the source for your computing.

It all depends on the license. There’s no umbrella ability to modify the source code of a software binary, open-source or proprietary, unless explicitly allowed.

See but with Godot you can share your updates and receive others updates. You aren't dependent on any single organization for the project to continue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com