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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Unity licensed mono, with a very special license, for that specific version of mono. Then there was what, 4 or 5 years of wrangling and no C# version updates because of licensing and royalty disagreements with 'whoever owns mono at the moment'. I can't honestly be bothered digging the threads up, but search the unity forums and you'll get the whole story.

Unity is now officially pursuing the 'compiles C# to C++' thing. They say it's because its 5-10x faster (and it is... compared to the specific C# runtime they're using...). I'd guess that lets them do some legal loop hole things.

Licensing. Devil's in the details.

Unreal just nipped the whole thing in the bud by saying; make it free and open source, or don't come to the party.

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According to the Mono project's website they are open source: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/

It's all MIT and GPL: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/faq/licensing/

Devils in the details huh? https://store.xamarin.com/

Doesn't look free to me.

(and I'm not being narky. This is the point I'm making; it's only superficially free. Then you have to say, ship a game, and woa~ wait, it has to be GPL now if you bundle the runtime, or you have to pay a licensing fee?)

Don't confuse Mono and Xamarin, they're two separate things.

"When do I need to obtain a license from Xamarin to the Mono Runtime? We only require licensing for uses of Mono and Moonlight on embedded systems, or systems where you are unable to fulfill the obligations of the GNU LGPL.

For example, if you manufacture a device where the end user is not able to do an upgrade of the Mono virtual machine or the Moonlight runtime from the source code, you will need a commercial license of Mono and Moonlight.

Or if you ship an application that requires to statically link the Mono runtime and you are not able to provide the object code to relink Mono, you must obtain a commercial license from Xamarin."

You can bundle as much as you want, as long as you adhere to the rules.

I don't even know what point you're making.

'as long as you adhere to the rules.'

Yes, by 'obtain a commercial license from Xamarin', they mean, 'pay a license fee'.

Like say, if you ship a mobile game. The only reason Unity gets away with it is because they have a licensing deal that permits them to ship mono.

If you want to write a mobile game, you pay for it.

That's not freedom.

Yeah, on a locked down mobile platform this is all true, but on the desktop the quote I pasted suggests you actually can use Mono for free.

To most users of Unreal Engine, mobile games aren't really a priority, though I understand Unreal wants to change this.

The problem in the mobile case is not that Mono isn't free; it's that the licence isn't permissive enough.

That mobile platforms and GPL-style licenses don't play well together is nothing new, and I think it's misleading to call Mono "not free" just because the restriction of the Apple App Store and iOS don't allow you to use it there.

> I don't even know what point you're making.

Then read again.

The fact is the runtime and libraries are MIT and LGPL. Your statement that your game has to be GPL if you use them is totally wrong. Least of all, because the GPL is neither of those two licenses, but most importantly, those licenses allow you to release a game under a license that's not even MIT or the LGPL, because that's the nature of those two licenses.

Unity is required to pay a custom license because they didn't want to accept the terms that are available to everyone. (I almost wrote "everyone else" there, but that would have been wrong because the terms were available even to Unity.)

You mind explaining that downvote there, buddy?

Open Source does not = Free of Cost.

Anyone can use the MIT or GPL and charge for services and it is actually encouraged by RMS.

For the person who down voted and think I am wrong:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Do you plan to give your game away for free?

Licensing How much does this cost?
To redistribute code written with Mono for Unreal Engine, you must have a commercial license to the Mono runtime.
These licenses are included in Xamarin's commercial products for targeting Mac, Android and iOS.
Xamarin product pricing starts at $0 for Starter Edition and adds Visual Studio support at $999 per developer, per platform.

In addition, you still need to comply to your license agreement with EpicGames for Unreal Engine.

I'd lay the blame on Unreal here. It's possible to bundle the mono runtime with your game, it's just that Unreal has done it in a way that doesn't satisfy the LGPL. As long as the runtime is a separate binary for which all source is available, you're fine. This can be made completely invisible to the end user.

Maybe there's some difficulty I'm not seeing here, though.

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