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by dmitriid 1363 days ago
> Neither Unreal Engine nor Apple's developer frameworks (shipped alongside Xcode) are public domain or copyleft.

You're confusing free with libre. Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".

1 comments

> You're confusing free with libre.

I'm not confusing them. The fact that they are not libre is precisely the point I was making. They are both proprietary intellectual property and encumber the person using them with financial obligations under some conditions.

> Apple's software and Unreal are free as in "free beer".

No, they are not. They're free as in "free beer when consumed on our premises, max five per customer, and if you sell our free beer to someone else we'll take some of that revenue thank you very much".

The comment you were replying to wasn't talking about free as in speech. They were talking about free as in beer. And the whole thread talks about money and cost. Not their source code availability.
> They were talking about free as in beer.

Right, and my point is that it's not free as in beer.

> Right, and my point is that it's not free as in beer.

But it is. Being free as in "free beer" has nothing to do with being or not being public domain or copyleft.

Public domain or copyleft refer to free as in "free speech".

> But it is.

Tell that to Epic Games' department of license revenue.

"Free as in beer" only concerns itself with the price of the distributed software.

Edit:

In Epic's case the tools remain free as in beer. There's no additional cost to using them.

Epic applies a fee to what you produce with them, and even then:

> A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.

If you were to distribute your product for free (as you want), you wouldn't pay Epic a single cent.