this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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It is source available, under the terms Epic licenses to you. Not Open Source
When did the term "open source" start including specifics about licensing terms? My understanding from the past few decades was that "open source" meant the source was available for people to look at and compile.
Open source has always meant under a free license. Being able to fork and publish your own versions is integral to the open source philosophy.
No, that is an enumerated freedom of the free software movement, not open source
The same article also talks about the difference between open source and source available:
Under that strict definition, software under the GNU GPL would not be "open source" because the license stays with the code, and is not truly "for any purpose," which is the same deal with the Epic license: you may use, study, change, and distribute the Unreal source code, but it stays under Epic's license.
If you are talking about the FREEDOM to fork and publish and share and whatever, then you mean Free software.
You are not allowed to distribute unreal source. From their FAQ:
Unreal Engine licensees are permitted to post engine code snippets (up to 30 lines) in a public forum, but only for the purpose of discussing the content of the snippet
But the code is easily visible and you can compile it yourself. If you say "I only run software I 100% knows what it does because I can read it's source code" then Unreal Engine fits, it's open source.
That's not why people want an open source game engine though, they want it to be open source so that they can't do a unity
I agree the phrase "open source" is a bit confusing
That has nothing to do with open source, that has to to with licensing, which I'm pretty sure isn't an issue anyway since I think Unreal versions are tied to specific license versions, i.e. if you download the engine under one term, thats the only one you have to use
Ideas started in the 70s, Free Software Movement happened in the 80s, the term Open Source from the 90s as an alternative to “free” to be more clear.
It always meant this.
Yes, open source.
You mean free/libre? Open source literally just means you can see the source.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
And then later on...
Unreal Engine is technically open source, because it's source code is made available to the general public. But it is licensed under a restrictive EULA instead of any of the normal licenses you'd expect for an open source project (MIT, Apache, GPL3, etc).
This is definitely pedantic, but "open source" is a colloquial term, not a technical one. Most people mean FOSS when they say open source, but the terms aren't exactly equivalent. The license that governs the code is really the only part that actually matters.
Let's just call it OpenSource+ at this point ;)