[treprinum]

A peek into the future: "Godot engine after becoming successful due to Unity flopping a decade ago has decided to change its licensing terms, requiring retroactive payments as well as advance payments for future estimated sales. The new CEO from Microsoft Games has stated that this approach brings the most value to shareholders, developers and gamers and brings the long sought stability to the development of the engine."

[marcodiego]

That is an advantage of a FLOSS solution: if such a thing happens, we can fork it.

[johnnyanmac]

Yup, it's not that FOSS is immune to enshittification, it's that it puts power into the user's hands should that time some.

The worst case is that Godot forks, rebrands, goes private with the rebrand, and leaves the public branch unmaintained. But in that case your current game isn't screwed. It is still yours, can't be nickle and died, and you have source code access to fix any bugs (even if you lost a lot of support). Though, it is very likely someone else decides to maintain Godot as a result of this.

[xethos]

This kind of sellout is why we have OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, or Nextcloud instead of Owncloud. If the project stops respecting users, the users can and will leave. And they'll be no worse off, because they can pretty well start off right where they were.

[Guvante]

There is a reason open source is defined by the license. If all of the code is available with a permissive license it is impossible to do this without allowing people to fork your old version and maintain it in perpetuity.