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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Sure but that attitude doesn’t help game developers looking to make a living selling console games. Godot with its licensing, helped by Unity messing up big time, is about to become the entry level game engine… The engine universities and self-taught game developers will likely use it as learning tool. Godot got a big influx of donations even though it’s under a permissive license. Small indies don’t care to modify the core engine anyway. Most GZDoom games on Steam are living proof of that. Game logic in separate scripts isn’t covered by the interpreter’s license anyway.






  • People generally aren’t surprised by the effects of the MIT license, they’re surprised by the behavior of other humans.

    Wait, people give other people the right to make proprietary variants of released source code and then are surprised when they exercise that right?

    Less permissive licenses protect against that.

    No, other licenses don’t protect against not understanding which rights are granted. The GPL, for example, allows to make proprietary web services using GPL code and to never release any modifications to that code. Many people were very surprised many years ago that some web-based messenger could use Pidgin’s libpurple to connect to ICQ etc. without ever giving anything back.





  • And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

    That’s actually an important factor for ancient software whose source code was lost. A developer could, for example, declare all their old Atari 2600 games to be under GPL by just announcing it in their news blog. Collectors could then hunt for the binary files and decompile them. Decompiled software is still a derivative work, so that source code would still be under GPL. Sadly I’m just aware of one case from years ago where I can’t even remember the specifics who and which software it was but he was like “I found some floppy disks from the 1980s, I lost the source code but binaries under GPL, so have fun”.