I guess UE doesn't really target small games? When I think of Unreal Engine I think of AAA FPS Games with amazing graphics, but has anyone actually used it for small indie games?
Also nice to see it's opensource, I guess I read the news a couple of months ago but I forgot. I had no idea.
[1]: http://www.antichamber-game.com/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/user/RockLeeSmile/search?query=unrea...
(I don’t want to sound like I agree with Stallman. I’m just trying to clarify definitions.)
To be fair, this is a term invented by Microsoft and only used by them, but I think it's accurate.
Open source doesn't depend on whether you pay for it.
Exactly. Literally the only difference now is that UE4 is much, much cheaper.
As you describe it, Unreal Engine is open source.
Free Software = source is available and free as in beer and copylefted (you must also release your derivatives as free software). Examples: gcc, mysql, linux, gnome, gimp
Unreal is neither of these. It's not free as in beer nor copylefted. It's just that if you are allowed to use the source if you license the engine.
Open source software does not necessitate any price requirements, but rights to redistribution, modification and running for any purpose without restriction. The definition you gave - "source is available and free as in beer" can still very well apply to proprietary software, if redistribution is forbidden. There actually is such a thing, it's called "shared source" by Microsoft.
Free software is any software that satisfies the four essential freedoms [1], of which being copyleft is absolutely not required in any way.
For all practical purposes, OSI and FSF standards are equivalent. They differ in that the former is more oriented toward pragmatics and business, whereas the latter toward ethics and philosophy. As a result, the FSF tends to encourage copyleft more than the OSI do, but they do not necessitate it by any means.