[evv]

They have gone with an interesting licensing solution here. I really appreciate that it is labeled as a source-available license instead of Open Source.

https://defold.com/license/

You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). You can freely monetize games built with the engine, and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.

And finally, the reason why this is not Apache 2.0- you cannot monetize (forks of) the game engine itself.

This seems fair and carefully considered. Kudos to the team!

[echelon]

This is an awesome license. More products should be source-available like this.

This is what sustainable "equitable open source" looks like. It keeps the team that built the product able to monetize, but it does so without harming or killing the community. The community has full access to the code and can modify it, make money from products made with it, and can presumably take over if the originating organization dies.

The company can choose which services to offer for free and which ones to charge a premium for. Cloud CI/builds and hosting seem like good monetization levers while leaving the engine and editor completely free of charge and open for development and modification. You can build a sustainable lifestyle business this way.

Database vendors should use licenses like this to prevent Amazon from stealing their work and bleeding their cash flow.

Redis and Elasticsearch should have done this before Amazon cloned their products, started making bank on managed versions, killed their monetization efforts, and turned their communities against them.

Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit.

[ilariel]

At least they mention that it is source-available, but they still mix "open source" into the mix on their site.

It is a really nice and fair source-available license and there should be more of this, but a license like theirs also restricts what kind of software you can make in a rather harsh way.

Since you can't commercialise game engine products and they are defined in a broad way. You could land in legal issues. Game engine products are defined in the license as:

“Game Engine Product” shall mean software used for video game development. This includes both the content authoring software and the software used to show the created content.

IANAL, but map editors, modding tools and many other kind of tools that can be used for developing video games could be in violation of the license.

Since meaning of "commercialise" isn't being defined or narrowed in the license small creators using Patreon or the like while asking donations could be classified as a violation too.

[PolCPP]

The only options i see are:

- Give the modding tools for free with the game (like many games do anyway). You're commercializing the game no the modding tools - Make the tools defold-free ? So it reads the game data but its not defold. - Tools for free but charge for support/warranty?, Clause 9 lets you sell support/warranty; you just can’t charge for the software license itself.

[bee_rider]

It could be nice if they had some sort of easy approval process for small Patreon users to commercialize the building of tools for their platform.

[mst]

They seem to be fairly explicit that _they_ believe that extensions aren't covered by those restrictions.

Possibly the license text needs to be tweaked to make that more clear (IANAL too) but I read it as meaning that commercial extensions were fine, just not commercialising a patched version of the core code.

Your concerns do seem entirely reasonable, but if, in practice, they become an issue, it seems like the codified-in-law goals of the foundation (see https://defold.com/foundation/) strongly suggest they _would_ tweak the license text as required.

I dunno, I don't think the harsh restrictions you mention exist, and I'd hope that if any actual lawyers read them as existing then their employers will direct them to help get the license bugfixed.

So colour me "cautiously optimistic" here.

[Shorel]

People don't have such hindsight. And we can't ask them to have it, as it is impossible to predict the future with such accuracy.

Without RMS swinging hard one way and without Amazon swinging hard the other way, we would not have this license.

It is because all of these shenanigans that we now kind of have a license that solves these issues, and surely when the landscape changes again, a new license scheme will be needed.

[graemep]

> Matt Mullenweg should have done this instead of throwing a fit

Not a choice he had. You cannot relicense GPL code line that. He would have had to write a new system from scratch instead of forking an existing one.

[saghm]

I thought that copyright holders could relicense code however they wanted? I don't think GPL or not is the issue, but whether or not all third-party contributors have assigned the copyright of their contributions to the party trying to relicense. My understanding is that this is often difficult or even impossible in practice to obtain after the fact codebases with large numbers of contributors over the years if signing something ahead of time wasnt't a requirement previously, and I don't have any insight into whether Wordpress is in this situation or not, but I don't think whether the code is GPL or not is relevant to this

[graemep]

Yes, the copyright holders can relicense, but its highly unlikely they will do this to enable a fork to have a different license, and wordpress started as a fork of b2.

If Mullenweg had been the original developer it would be valid criticism.

[benoau]

Really what it means is there is one entity entitled to monetize the project, so it will probably just die if their monetization ideas or execution are lacking or their enthusiasm wanes. GitHub is full of dead projects like this because monetizing software is hard, building important software is hard, and doing both is even harder. Open source should be funded, but this isn't an efficient way to do it.

Mullenweg, approximate net worth $400 million, should have thought long and hard 20 years ago if "a rising tide lifts all boats" allows for others to have boats, or just his. There should be a $billions ecosystem around WP even if Mullenweg doesn't get that money.

[Tepix]

I agree that the license looks fair. Not everything has to be OSI-compliant open source. They even support WASM!

[executesorder66]

> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL).

Why is that a good thing?

>You can freely monetize games built with the engine,

You'd also be able to do the same if it had a GPL license

>and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.

If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to rely on "some assurances"

[Ethee]

Consider the space we're in. For game development you're going to have a lot of developers with a lot of different ideas about how to make a game, all utilizing the same engine. If the engine doesn't come with a feature I need, I'll probably have to code it myself, but seeing as the whole purpose of me making this feature is for my game, then it makes sense that I should be able to keep my game's feature private/proprietary without the need to push that feature back to engine which might not even want my feature to begin with. This is why GPL is not a good choice for game engines.

[Arelius]

More importantly, a successful game is likely to need porting to proprietary platforms, with APIs behind restrictive NDAs.

Honestly, not great, but that's the world we live in.

[badsectoracula]

GPL doesn't require you to push a feature/change/etc back to the engine devs, it only requires you to make it available to others. You can just keep your changes in a ZIP file alongside your game's data - which is what a bunch of games built on the GPL releases of id Tech already do.

[all2]

>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL). > Why is that a good thing?

Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do proprietary things is attractive to big players.

>> and they make some assurances that there won't be a bait-and-switch.

> If it was licensed under a GPL license you wouldn't need to rely on "some assurances"

Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no guarantee).

[executesorder66]

> Game dev at the top tiers is an arms race. Being able to do proprietary things is attractive to big players.

Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players and not everyone else is a good thing.

>Multiple projects have gone closed-source from open source. Assurances are a nice thing to have (but certainly no guarantee).

Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they later become closed source, the code up till that point will remain open source forever. So it is guaranteed whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.

[all2]

> Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players and not everyone else is a good thing.

If you want your stuff to be private, you have a legal option.

> Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they later become closed source, the code up till that point will remain open source forever. So it is guaranteed whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.

I guess? Is that not the case here as well?

[mst]

> Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they later become closed source, the code up till that point will remain open source forever.

The changes from the Apache 2.0 license are sufficiently minimal that you can _still_ fork it from that point, you just (a) won't be able to use the trademark (b) won't be able to sell it.

Given the clearly stated goals of the foundation and hence the project, that seems to be providing exactly the guarantees they intend to provide, and while your point about assurances is entirely fair, I think you're underestimating the level of legal guarantees that you do get here.

[nurettin]

>> You can make proprietary changes to the engine without releasing them (unlike GPL).

> Why is that a good thing?

Instead of writing an internal project from scratch, you modify an existing project and tightly couple it with your internal process. What's wrong with that?

[sirtaj]

I don't think that violates the GPL, it does only if you distribute the modified version without also providing the source changes.

[poulpy123]

I like the licence, and it is for me open source in spirit if not in letter, but there is a case that could cause problems : what if you sell services for a closed source version of defold ?

[simonbw]

It specifically says you are not allowed to commercialize the engine or a derivative, so that sounds like something that is not intended to be allowed, though I feel like it might take a lawyer to decide whether or not that is technically allowed by the license.

[frankvdwaal]

You'd first have to make proprietary changes, which you are not allowed to release, and so there's nobody to sell those services to.

[RandallBrown]

> You are free to distribute original or modified (derivative) versions of Defold

You just don't have to release the code if you do change it.

Although I'm unsure if selling services on your modified game engine, that you released the source of, counts as commercialization.