Thread by @reduzio

It's important that companies make their source available, but this does not mean it's considered "Open Source". As this term is not too familiar to those in the video games industry, here is a quick set of points to understand the value this software licensing model has for you:

1) Open source is about collaborative development, meaning everyone who uses and contributes to the project can benefit equally. When this is not the case, someone will benefit more from your code contributions than you will from theirs.

2) Open source is about your personal freedom as a user. When given to you, you can re license it, close it, or do whatever you want with it.

When this is not the case, you can obtain it, but you won't have the same freedoms as that who gave it to you.

3) Open source is about ownership. Every game you create is owned by you forever. When software is not open, you own your game, but your end product is tied to a specific license of this software, which is not yours.

Companies can close or products can be discontinued if they are not profitable (think of Flash, XNA, Parse, etc). You game will depend on software that will no longer function. With open source, you will always be able to retain control and popular projects never die.

4) Finally, Open Source has often minimal restrictions. Most commonly, the origin of the software must not be misrepresented and, sometimes, you must mention that you used it (most games, even AAA games, just put this at the bottom of the credits screen), but this is all.

If you have doubts whether a certain piece of software is Open Source, you can always consult the licenses in the Open Source Initiative website. Godot uses the very permissive MIT license.

opensource.org

Commercial software that makes their source code available, but does not conform to any of the points above (and license is not OSI approved) is often called "Source Available" instead of "Open Source".

So, next time somebody mentions that certain piece of software or game engine is "Open Source" because they have all or part of the source code on GitHub, feel free to correct them :)

We develop @godotengine with love, so you can enjoy all these freedoms when you create your games.