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> Taking games as an example, in todays AAA games most have a long list of licensed work, with everything from personal permission slips to standard licenses li

> Taking games as an example, in todays AAA games most have a long list of licensed work, with everything from personal permission slips to standard licenses like proprietary licensed third-party, lgpl, apache, bsd, mit and project specific ones. If they mess up on any single of those license requirement, they risk inoperation for the whole product. Commercial engines generally have a clause in there that you are not allowed to bring any GPL code in contact with the engine, no exceptions.

belorn 12y ago
Commercial engines generally are not compatible with license requirement from other licenses. That is however outside the point since the argument parent post made is that the threat of enforcing third-party licenses will make every company switch to self-production only.
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > [...] the argument parent post made is that the threat of enforcing third-party licenses will make every company switch to self-production only. Note this problem only applies (in practice) to GPL licenses which are explicitly disallowed in all gaming environments I have encountered. As such the problem is moot. There are lots of Open Source code in computer games, just not GPL. It's a non issue.
  - belorn 12y ago
    How would this problem only apply to GPL? If you do not give the 5% revenue to unreal when using their engine, I am sure they will sue. A company can not pick and choose which license agreement to follow and which to ignore, or they risk inoperation from lawsuits. In practice, license conditions are balanced to the interest of the company. Some might be perfectly fine with 5% revenue losses in order to pay for a engine, where others would strongly disallow it. If this lawsuit succeed, my guess is that any damages will be far less than 5% total revenue from the years of Linux usage.
    - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
      > How would this problem only apply to GPL? Because not many other licenses like GPL "spread" to the entirety of the project. Sure, you can draft another license like this, but out of the popular ones there really is only the (A)GPL which does that.
    - lmm 12y ago
      The worst cases are better with most other licenses though: * Most of the time commercial libraries like unreal make a distinction between interface and implementation. In the worst case you could swap out their implementation and reimplement the methods you use, which will be expensive but at least at the end of it you'll have a clean codebase that you own. With GPLed code even that might not be enough - you could replace the GPLed implementation and your codebase might still be a derivative work of the GPLed library. * Epic is a profit-making business with obligations to their shareholders; ultimately resolving any issue with them is going to be "only" a matter of money, it's not in their interests for your company to go out of business. An individual GPL copyrightholder is more likely to be idealistic/spiteful about it. And GPLed libraries often have several copyrightholders, multiplying the risk.

belorn 12y ago

Commercial engines generally are not compatible with license requirement from other licenses. That is however outside the point since the argument parent post made is that the threat of enforcing third-party licenses will make every company switch to self-production only.

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> [...] the argument parent post made is that the threat of enforcing third-party licenses will make every company switch to self-production only. Note this problem only applies (in practice) to GPL licenses which are explicitly disallowed in all gaming environments I have encountered. As such the problem is moot. There are lots of Open Source code in computer games, just not GPL. It's a non issue.
- belorn 12y ago
  How would this problem only apply to GPL? If you do not give the 5% revenue to unreal when using their engine, I am sure they will sue. A company can not pick and choose which license agreement to follow and which to ignore, or they risk inoperation from lawsuits. In practice, license conditions are balanced to the interest of the company. Some might be perfectly fine with 5% revenue losses in order to pay for a engine, where others would strongly disallow it. If this lawsuit succeed, my guess is that any damages will be far less than 5% total revenue from the years of Linux usage.
  - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
    > How would this problem only apply to GPL? Because not many other licenses like GPL "spread" to the entirety of the project. Sure, you can draft another license like this, but out of the popular ones there really is only the (A)GPL which does that.
  - lmm 12y ago
    The worst cases are better with most other licenses though: * Most of the time commercial libraries like unreal make a distinction between interface and implementation. In the worst case you could swap out their implementation and reimplement the methods you use, which will be expensive but at least at the end of it you'll have a clean codebase that you own. With GPLed code even that might not be enough - you could replace the GPLed implementation and your codebase might still be a derivative work of the GPLed library. * Epic is a profit-making business with obligations to their shareholders; ultimately resolving any issue with them is going to be "only" a matter of money, it's not in their interests for your company to go out of business. An individual GPL copyrightholder is more likely to be idealistic/spiteful about it. And GPLed libraries often have several copyrightholders, multiplying the risk.