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There is a future where in the long term Unreal Engine (and maybe Unity3D as well) is FOSS in the same way that browsers are. Epic's business model would have
by Impossible 7y ago
There is a future where in the long term Unreal Engine (and maybe Unity3D as well) is FOSS in the same way that browsers are. Epic's business model would have to move away from engine royalties, which currently depends on the success of their store or potentially lasting longevity and growth of Fortnite.
- Mathnerd314 7y agoUnreal Engine kind of already is open source, for weak definitions of open source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github
- gmueckl 7y agoThat's not Open Source as defined by the OSI. You can't redistribute source code and commercial use requires paying license fees to Epic (5% of revenue). So just don't get the wrong idea about that license, please. With UE4 they have created an engine that was extensible only via C++ and via their graphical scripting language. With the notorious instability and incompatibilities of ABIs of different C++ compilers, Epic didn't have a lot of options other than releasing the engine source so that their customers could recompile the whole engine with a single compiler version. And with Unity eating away at the indie market at that time, Epic needed a successor to the free, closed source UE3 UDK to keep a foot in that market. I don't think that Epic had a lot of other options at that point.
- Impossible 7y agoUnreal is source available, but not FOSS. There are a lot of restrictions in the license, sharing engine source without a (free) Epic login is against TOS for example, although you can fork the engine on GitHub and give other users that are part of the Epic organization access. I'm thinking a MIT (or some other permissive license) licensed UE.