[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.