This is quite good news, to say the least. This is one of the most well-integrated, sensible engines and development environments I've ever used.
Can't wait to patch more native moonscript support into a fork :evil:
If you want to see an overview of a somewhat typical and polished mobile game done with Defold, here's a non-King dev showing off his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4pJ8A3YS4
The Corona SDK always have a special place in my heart. I was in middle school when I've used it back then, and it tremendously helped in me learning programming at a young age.
Before, I would try to learn how to make games by dabbling with SDL/DirectX/Cocos2D/etc, but figured out that you can't really do much with these frameworks as a beginner than just copy-pasting code in the books and tutorials. I was really able to make "complete" apps once I've grabbed a no-nonsense batteries-included framework like Corona, and I would have wasted far more time on useless low-level stuff if I haven't stumbled upon it.
Oh, and about the unfortunate name they've decided with: who really knew that this coincidence would happen haha...
CoffeeScript development was one of the most regretful experiences I've had. Delimiters are optional even when invoking functions. A statement like f(g(h(x))) becomes painful to read. Plus, sometimes you want to use a function as a parameter, how do you reason about that? Welcome to the Twilight zone.
Whitespace in CoffeeScript has a meaning. In Python, that is the case too, but it only applies to statement blocks. In CoffeeScript, the situations you will find are just absurd, such as the fact that inconsistent indentation is allowed.
Code is written once, read many times. CoffeeScript emphasizes rapid writing not reading. In that sense, CoffeeScript is to JavaScript what Stenography is to Writing.
Tell that to Oxfordshire - plenty of companies still have Isis in the name (due to the local name for the Thames near Oxford being Isis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isis)
Interesting, in the UK Corona seems to be doing quite well, anecdotally I'm noticing it popping up as an extra option on a lot of food delivery restaurants, and a lot of friends posting pictures of their bottles after work.
Perhaps this is purely attributable to the British sense of irony.
Are you sure that’s the reason why? I can buy both Corona and Coronita, the difference is the size of the bottle. -ita in Spanish means “little” so Coronita bottles are 210ml while a bottle of Corona is 330ml.
Corona probably already held the Coronita trademark, because that was how it was branded in Spain until recently, because the brand was held by a winery.
It would be fun to see them reverting the brand once again. What bad luck!
We are humbled by the mostly positive reactions to the news we shared earlier today but also sorry for misrepresenting the license under which we make the source code available. Defold is a free and open game engine with a permissive license. The source code is available on GitHub and we invite the community to contribute.
We have updated the website to reflect this and we no longer use the term "Open Source" as to not confuse it with the OSD.
The Defold license, complete with a summary of what you can and cannot do, can be seen on our license page: https://defold.com/license/
Note: I'm not taking part in the OSS/FOSS drama, I'm just making a note that if you did want to change all occurrences, you might want to consider that one as well.
Thank you for this. I know it's a big undertaking to make a large project available to the community like this. Please don't let the side show discourage you.
Hey britzl, I appreciate the attempt to compromise on the terminology here. But, this falls flat pretty badly. "Free and open" is still trying to capitalize on the "free and open source" brand, and is going to mislead people into thinking it uses a FOSS license - seemingly deliberately. Can't you just call it "source available", which is the term we use for this kind of licensing model?
It's really not okay to be capitalizing on the FOSS brand without being FOSS. It's a kick in the groin to the FOSS community when companies do this.
The original feedback was largely requesting to not say "open source" and they've changed this. Much as I respect the position you always take on FOSS, the current position is a reasonable compromise between the original two standpoints, so I lower my weapon.
I don't really see this as an improvement over the previous situation. It's just misleading in a different way. In fact, it's worse: as far as I could tell, the term "open source" was used sparingly, to the point where I wasn't going to make a fuss about it when I saw this. Now, the term "free and open", which is equally misleading, is used much more prominently than "open source" ever was.
Not true. I went over the entire website and searched for "open source" and changed the wording. I did not add a bunch of extra "free and open" just for fun.
You seem to be confusing whether something is "open source" with "what kind of license does the code have".
Something being "open source" does not imply anything about its license.
Suggesting that only GPL-like software is allowed to use the term "open source" is crazy. It doesn't reflect the world we live in at all: there are thousands of projects on github without a license, or with some "free for non-military use"-type of license, or MIT/BSD-like licenses...
EDIT: "the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” (Richard Stallman, GNU Philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ). Not that Stallman did much better with "free software", which as the article argues, has the obvious meaning that 'the software is "for free"'.
Having to avoid expressions like "free software" or "open source" because two organizations decided to appropriate common english expressions to give them a complicated meaning is nuts.
> OSI decided to appropriate the term "Open source" to refer to something slightly weaker than "Free Software" but much stronger than "you can look at the source code". They are not in their right to do that.
This is incorrect. Over 20 years ago people who would later be part of OSI _coined_, not co-opted, the term (within the scope of software). It was coined to mean _exactly the same thing_ as "Free Software"; the OSD was directly derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines and there have only been two licenses, as I recall, that are OSI approved and the FSF have said are non-free.
You also confuse "OSI-approved license" with "GPL", because the OSI (and FSF) have approved permissive BSD and MIT and many other non-copyleft licenses. Here you go: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
And? There are a lot of Open Source licenses, and even Free Sofware licenses besides GPLv3.
but neither does LLVM (and many people do not consider LLVM to be free software
Note that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are different - albeit related - things.
nor the dozens projects on Github that don't have a license at all, or that have a license of the form "Free for non-commercial purposes" or the millions of flavors of that ("Free for non-military use", etc.).
And those things are not Open Source. They may be "Source Available", or "Shared Source" or "Something Else", but "Open Source" has a de facto definition of "uses a license which is OSD compliant."
That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto (and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).
The distinction really doesn’t seem that important for most use cases so it’s not that surprising a weaker, possibly more useful interpretation has become common...
That there is any significant confusion at all means it is not de facto
There isn't any significant confusion. There is a token amount of confusion, which is pretty much always clarified every time one of these threads comes up.
(and if something is right and true based on a definition I don’t think you can call it de facto either...).
It's de facto, not de jure, because OSI has no authority to enforce their definition, since they don't have a trademark (at least not a registered trademark) on the term "Open Source". What makes it the de facto definition is just usage. By and large, among the people who care about the legal details of Open Source licensing, the OSD is accepted. Yes, there are a handful of exceptions, but that's OK. It doesn't change the basic point.
I guess in my experience, the phrase is routinely used to refer to code availability and often the fact that a licensing fee doesn’t need to be negotiated or paid in order to run the code on our servers (either in an academic or corporate setting), which is a weaker requirement than the OSI definition.
Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning. I’m not saying it’s correct usage, but it’s definitely real and frequent.
It’s my impression a non-negligible number of people share the same understanding, evidence by the fact that this discussion apparently is recurring? Even those who corrected the Defold release language knew what was intended, even if they said it was incorrect usage of the phrase.
Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small; I just don’t think that is true based on my day to day experiences.
Real usage by real people not particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition—to me this is its de facto meaning.
I'm not talking about "people who are particularly passionate about adherence to the OSI definition" though. I'm talking about people who are "particularly interested in the actual technicalities of what OSS is", not all of whom may agree with the OSD. But I still argue that such a significant majority do that it constitutes the de facto definition.
Your response assumed the number of people who use the phrase with a looser meaning is small;
Not at all. I am saying that the people using that phrase in the "looser" sense, as you put it, are using it in a colloquial and not technical sense, and that such usage has no meaning as far as what the de facto meaning is, when used in an actual technical context. That's just lack of knowledge, not any attempt to create a different definition.
I see it more like somebody who doesn't know much about cars referring to an engine block as a carburetor. Even if a lot of people make that same mistake, it's still a mistake and the actual definitions of "engine block" and "carburetor" don't change.
Copyleft, free software, and open source all have different meanings, and GitHub has no restrictions on the license of software using its platform, and you're deliberately confoudning these things here to sow confusion. There are millions of different software licenses, yes, but that doesn't make them all open source. Give me a break. Is Windows "open source" by your reckoning? I has a license, after all, and I can decompile it, after all.
We're talking about EULAs, but your article and the Swartz case concern Terms of Use, which are related but different. Terms of Use concern access to someone else's computer system, hence why overzealous lawyers and prosecutors have tried to expand the CFAA to cover them.
EULAs concern what an end user can do with a piece of software on their own system or systems they control. I don't see how this intersects the CFAA at all.
Defold is Free, meaning that it doesn't cost anything to use and you don't have to pay any royalties.
Defold is Open, meaning that it is possible to modify and extend. It is actually possible to extend the engine even without source code access thanks to our native extension system.
The words "free and open" together, especially in this context, lead to a very strong association with free and open source software, so strong that a reader might not even notice the difference and think you're talking about FOSS.
Try googling "free and open" and tell me that this choice of words is not misleading after seeing the results.
Ironic. 'Gaslighting' is a term which specifically means manipulating someone into doubting their own memory and sanity by constantly contradicting what they have experienced. Co-opting it to mean any kind of misleading language dilutes the original meaning and is attempting to tap into the significant negative connotations of the term.
Behavior which explicitly meets your definition is seen a lot too in openwashing, like claims that the OSD retroactively defined "open source" or that there's never been a consensus on the meaning.
But your definition is exceedingly specific, to the point of rendering the term much less useful. Here's the Wikipedia definition given verbatim:
> Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs.
I agree that it's often falsely claimed that 'open source' was co-opted, though I suspect this is quite frequently not deliberate, since the term has become so common it seems 'obvious' that it was commonly used before being coined by the OSI (I in general support using the term 'open source' precisely, and I was in support of those calling for the removal of its use to describe this license). But I still think gaslighting is the wrong term to use for doing this (the wiki definition you've given doesn't differ significantly from what I said). revisionism, maybe, and it certainly doesn't match the definition and context in which it was used in your comment above.
You are categorically incorrect here. Being open for modification is broader than just being extensible. He's using language correctly, and you're reacting emotionally to this whole situation.
Yes it comes close to the open source branding, no it is not the open source branding, they even distance themselves quite clearly right in the header of the page.
>You are categorically incorrect here. Being open for modification is broader than just being extensible.
What does the word "open" have to do with extensibility? Absolutely nothing. You had to phrase this as "open for modification" to make your point, why isn't "open" alone sufficient? My local museum is open from 10 AM to 8 PM daily, at least when COVID-19 is behind us. Does that mean I can bring my own exhibits, or remove the existing ones? No.
"Open" alone is fine. "Open source" has a specific meaning. "Free and open" is deliberately cribbing off of the well-known phrase "free and open source". How about this: why is "open and free" less suitable?
I added the "for modification" to reference the open/closed principle of object oriented programming. For many programmers the word open has everything to do with extensibility.
"Open and free" sounds like a great suggestion, maybe we could lead with that? Maybe I missed some discussion about that suggestion, I only responded to your remark about the word 'open'.
The typical way to describe this, especially in this sector, would be "royalty-free", right? "Royalty-free shared source game engine" would be about 10x better than either "free and open" or "open and free", which sounds intentionally misleading (even if it's not).
No, because the royalty says something whether you have to pay, but what is meant is that it's not just shared source, you're actually allowed to use modify and extend the source, under certain conditions.
Folks here were previously arguing that when Defold is said to be "free", you're not saying it's capital-F Free, but instead that it's gratis. Now you're saying that the "free" part was referring to something like the FSF's version of free (albeit incompatible!) all along. Pick a position.
No, you started to talk about things being gratis ("royalty-free"), and I'm pointing out that that's not what we're talking about.
Or are you saying that because I'm stating that open is referring to the licensing, that implies the free refers to the gratis part? I guess that's correct, but that's not a point I raised earlier so I'm not inconsistent in my position.
> No, you started to talk about things being gratis
No. That didn't begin with me. This entire discussion is filled with people defending your use of "free" to mean gratis.
> I'm pointing out that that's not what we're talking about
Okay, well now it's not clear what you're trying to communicate with the word "free".
My point was that if you were using the word "free" to mean gratis, then the best thing would be to call it "royalty-free" instead. That's already the accepted nomenclature for creative/industry use, anyway, and it'd be the least confusing choice for this case in particular.
Since I'm not using the word free I'm not trying to communicate anything with it. I think maybe you're confusing me with someone else. You're in the wrong thread at the very least.
Jeez, why did I forget I wrote that. You're totally right I apologize. In my defense it wasn't my idea to call it that, but it makes total sense that you'd start a discussion about it, I guess I was just confused.
King's unsavory handling of trademark disputes (trademarking "Candy" and "Saga" and voraciously enforcing it against games like The Banner Saga and CandySwipe [which came out before Candy Crush]) is gonna steer me clear of this one.
Not sure how you are counting. Romain and Sara work for King. Elin is a consultant. Björn (me) and Mathias have left King to work on behalf of the foundation.
This makes me realise that I need to update my LinkedIn profile if anyone bothers to check it!
I was just looking at https://defold.com/foundation/ , it says Mathias "has spent the last 4 years at King" and that you became a product owner at King in 2018, I assumed you both still worked there since it doesn't say you ever left.
Wow, this will hopefully ignite a sleuth of creativity. I think their choice of using lua to script while also having a pretty great user experience (in v2 and v1) should put them on the radar for most indie developers now. Hopefully this also creates some friendly competition with godot (though I think they have the momentum) but for 2d prototyping for programming novices, I'll always recommend defold. Kudos King.
The release of the Defold source code and the transition to the Defold Foundation was the culmination of many months of preparations. While most things went smoothly (except an SVG which crashed the Firefox browser!) we never anticipated the amount of feedback we received on our use of the term Open Source. We have summarised our thoughts and the actions we have taken here:
For anyone who's used this, how does it compare with popular open source engines like Godot, and with the commercial industry standards like Unreal Engine and Unity?
FYI, you were presumably downvoted since the post you replied to had not claimed that Defold, Unreal, or Unity were Open Source. It claimed that Godot was open source, which is true.
FWIW - I started a game on Defold and ended up rewriting and porting it to Unity. It's been a while since I used it - about a year - but Unity just has a lot more bells and whistles.
Defold uses message passing, which initially I was very excited about, but it turns out my brain is used to thinking about objects and references and I kind of struggled to do simple things in Defold which is part of the reason I switched to Unity.
One thing that did make it over in the port is a cool actor-based AI that I probably wouldn't have thought to use if I started the game in Unity.
Defold does give you a ton of control though and it would enable more customization than Unity, especially now that it is open source.
I should also say the Defold community is great and the devs behind the game engine are very helpful.
And this is my first game so any difficulties with Defold could be due to my initial learning curve.
Godot is actually open source, unlike this - you can modify it however you like and still sell your game. Defold allows you to see the internals, but if something doesn't work the way you want, you can't change it and still get to sell your game.
The only one restriction: you can't sell the engine itself!
You can sell the game made with Defold.
You don't understand something or you are misleading people.
No, they are correct. 'Open Source' is a term-of-art in the software world. We use the OSI's definition, which is a good deal stricter than just making the source available. The licence used by Defold is not an Open Source licence.
> You are free to modify Defold and you are not required to share the changes
but also:
> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine
I think they mean you cannot start a business selling your fork of their game-engine. I don't think they mean you may not use a modified engine in a commercial product. This seems to fit with the full text of the licence, which says:
> You do not sell or otherwise commercialise the Work or Derivative Works as a Game Engine Product
I think it would be pretty hard to distinguish between commercializing a game with a modified Defold engine which can be heavily modded by the player and commercializing a modified Defold game engine. Quite a few games have been modded into entirely different games sharing only the engine.
Just something to think about if you were planning on allowing mods in your game. Do they only care about how you advertise the product, or will they be looking at how it's actually being used?
Interesting point. That's different from typical moddable commercial game/game engine.
Typically, people may buy a game in order to play its free mods, but you can't tweak the engine and then sell that modified engine to other game studios. Whatever happens, the end-user has to have a licence for the original game.
This is a little different though, as you can modify the engine, then sell your game, and permit payware mods to use your modified version of the engine, perhaps even insisting on taking a cut. All the while the Defold guys don't get a penny.
#1 is freedom to redistribute the original software, alone or in aggregate. I don't see how it violates that. #6 is freedom from discrimination regarding field of endeavour. Restrictions on commercial use (including exercise of the other freedoms in a commercial context, e.g. sale of modified versions) violate #6, not #1.
I think that's closer to the way I was reading it at first, but then I realized that #6 refers to use and not distribution. So I think (although, IANAL) that #6 is not about dealing with the commercial sales aspect. I think this is more for the kind of things like "You can use this software for anything except developing military weapons" or that sort of clause that you sometimes see.
#1 OTOH deals with "selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources." This would seem to be the clause that would be violated by a "you can't sell this commercially" clause. Although, looking at it, I just realized that somebody could argue that due to the use of the phrase "component of an aggregate software distribution", that this actually isn't violated by a restriction on selling the software alone! I'm pretty sure that's not the way that was ever intended to be interpreted though, and that an aggregate can include as few as 1 components. Otherwise it would be silly, because you could always then in turn create an "aggregate" by adding some arbitrary files of your own.
#1 only applies to aggregate distributions "containing programs from several different sources". As such it clearly would not apply to distributing a single program. One program by itself is not an aggregate as the term is commonly used and certainly does not contain programs from several different sources.
#6 is titled "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour" and explicitly refers to commercial use as a field of endeavour. The annotated version[1] says:
> Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.
Restricting commercial distribution of modified versions would discriminate against commercial users. I argue that the word "use" in this context is referring not only to running the program but to the exercise of any of the freedoms outlined in the Open Source Definition.
Restricting commercial distribution of modified versions would discriminate against commercial users.
That depends on whether or not "use" and "distribute" are seen as two completely different "things", or whether distribution is a subtype of usage. It makes more sense, to me, for it to be the latter - but the actual text of the OSD is a little bit ambiguous on that point. At least to my reading.
Still, regardless of how one justifies it, I feel like it's pretty well accepted that a "you can't sell this commercially" clause in a license makes it non-OSD compliant. As it should be.
My guess is that is an step to discontinue the product. Defold has never been a big project inside the company. Candy Crush uses Fiction Factory, and the last time I heard about internal development, Unity was a growing technology. (If you live in Stockholm you can find a job as Unity architect at King).
So, instead of silently killing Defold a second life as an open source project seems more merciful for the people that internally believed in the project.
The question if Defold will be open sourced is one of the most common questions asked since Defold was launched in 2016.
By open sourcing Defold and handing it to the Defold Foundation we build trust with the community. It guarantees that Defold will be around regardless of what happens with King. And by handing over Defold to the Defold Foundation we believe it gives a lot of credibility to Defold as a strong and independent open source game engine.
I really do appreciate you making it available under such generous terms, but I fear you are wasting a lot of that credibility by calling it "open source" when it's not under an OSI-compliant license. This is something people feel very strongly about.
Please, I implore you, don't claim it to be open source. Call it "a very permissive licence", or "source available", but don't claim to be open source unless you actually are.
I love the release, I appreciate the time and effort, and I'm sure you have the best intentions, but the term "open source" has a very well defined meaning for very well defined reasons, and those reasons are hugely important to the last few decades of technological development. Please don't break the definition, even if you have the best of intentions!
Once again, thanks and congratulations on the release!
This fraud is successfully building animus in the community. It is,by definition, not open source. An open source license MUST allow any use, including commercial use.
Probably also to show that there are more companies than just King using it, so you'll get less scared of King "owning" the development of the engine and it's community.
Why would you use this over say, Unity or Unreal? Seems more niche, less popular (so less assets/community libraries etc.) and less integrated into...everything?
Defold is optimized to produce small binaries, and features you don't use can be turned to to further decrease your bundle size.
It also focuses a lot on providing fast iteration times. You can hot-reload changed assets onto a device while the game is running. For most asset types, you'll see the change on device in less than a second. Similarly, a Build and Run cycle from scratch for a moderately complex game project such as Blossom Blast typically takes around a minute or so, and subsequent cached builds can start in a couple of seconds.
(Edit: Full disclosure, I worked on the Defold editor.)
You can accomplish quite a bit with this game engine, check out this narrative that I started making with Defold a few months ago (playable in browser)
[The editor] is written in Clojure, which some people will probably like. Here's a video from a few years ago explaining how that makes the whole editor extensible with live-code:
To clarify, the Defold Editor is written in Clojure, whereas the runtime component is written in a carefully selected subset of C++ in order to keep executable sizes small and compile times fast.
You can write game-specific extensions to the runtime in C++ if your game requires it, but most games are authored in just Lua.
It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Defold is a free and open game engine with a permissive license and we invite the community to contribute on GitHub. Please see this statement: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517
It is a polished product, and it is a good move. I did try to use it briefly in a small sample, it was reasonably easy to use as well. However I didn't like Lua, would have preferred something more flexible/expressive like JS.
Lua has something of the schoolhouse feel about it, too prim and rigid like Pascal.
So I am presently thinking of moving on to Phaser.io.
Weird, I would consider lua to be _more_ expressive than JS, thanks to its optional syntax for function calls and the metatables which allow stuff like operator overloading.
I'm so tired of companies trying to co-opt the definition of open source.
My (probably flawed) comparison is to the term "fair use". Yes, you can play all sorts of games to make those 2 words mean almost anything you want, but at the end of the day that term is defined by law, not by pedantry.
"open source" has an accepted definition, and it's damaging to society to try to undermine it.
If you think I'm exaggerating, please remember that you can probably thank open-source software for the growth of the Internet, the availability of previously restricted secure encryption and thousands of tools that you probably use to earn a living.
But it's not just "Source Available". You can modify source code, fork it and use your own version of the engine, and so on. The only restriction that you can't SELL the engine itself.
What is the right name for that if not "Open source"?
Thank you for the feedback! It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Defold is a free and open game engine with a permissive license and we invite the community to contribute on GitHub. Please see this statement: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1262744466311360517
TBH, given the prevalence of "asset flipping" in the games industry I can kind of see why they went with staying defensive about commercializing the game engine itself.
Also, given that the original engine is now free as well doesn't this change actually make the license a bit more GPL like? If you modify the Defold engine you can only give it away or keep it to yourself, basically.
Strictly speaking yes, but as this thread shows, any actual attempt to do so will result in a storm of angry and mean developers looking for any potential flaw. Is absolutely every change available and documented? Did the repository go offline for an hour last Sunday night? You are allowed to sell GPL software like you are allowed to press your fingers into a meat grinder. If you actually look at big software houses you will find a majority avoiding or backing away from GPL code in favor of BSD or Apache style licensing because dealing with GPL is such a wretched nightmare for commercial entities.
Apple seems to avoid GPL at all costs and was presumably the reason why macOS used to ship with an older version of gcc (and related tools?) due to the older version using a more permissive version of the license.
AFAIK there could also be some issues sending software to the AppStore if it includes GPL licensed code, but LGPL licensed binaries should be ok to include (from what I understand). Of course this is from a closed source standpoint, my clients don’t generally like to open source their projects.
Personally GPL sounds like a minefield to me so as a developer I avoid GPL licensed code if possible and much prefer BSD licensed code.
To expand a bit on what the parent said: you're allowed to sell GPL software, but the person who bought it is still welcome to give it away for free. The FSF is of the opinion that this can be a viable business model, but I'm not sure I believe that.
There's been cases of people taking Blender, renaming it and selling it as their own "3D authoring software". GPL permits that, although morally it's very sketchy.
If the people selling it are providing support for it I don't really find it morally sketchy. Especially if the provide credit- which is required by many open source licenses, in one way or another.
The original Doom license is not a free open-source license, and is in fact fairly restrictive. However you are right, the game was re-licensed a few years later under GPL, making the game dual-licenses under GPL and the Doom License.
Wow, I didn't realize that the estabilished definition of open source excludes the GPL:
> 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
> The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
The GPL does not have that restriction. GPL software can be distributed alongside non-GPL-compliant software just fine. This happens in every single Linux distribution.
> The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.
When I base software on GPL software, then my software is distributed along with that GPL software. According to this phrase, GPL might not place restrictions on my software. Yet it does.
There is a profound misunderstanding here somewhere. I suspect it is coming from the use of the phrase 'base on'. If you modify GPL licensed software, your software is restricted because it qualifies as a derivative work under copyright law, and it must comply with GPL. But if you zip up a GPL program with your non-GPL program and distribute the bundle, the GPL does nothing to restrict your non-GPL program. If there's linking involved, it gets more complicated, but that's unrelated to this discussion.
> If there's linking involved, it gets more complicated, but that's unrelated to this discussion.
I think it is very much related. If my linker cannot link GPLed software because of the license of this software, then this software is restricting my linker. As per the definition of opensource.org, GPLed software is not open source.
If your view of the definition were true, then the OSI definition would have been more clear about the distinction.
Further, as an example, software running on Linux is clearly different than the Linux kernel. Nobody would say that an application and the OS kernel is the same software. OSI doesn't make a distinction between library calls and kernel calls.
This seems very misleading. A library released under the GPL cannot be used by non-GPL software. That's by design. It's the reason for the more permissive LGPL licence.
edit For brevity I ignored dual licensing. If you release your library under both GPL and Apache, then things are of course different.
That's not how it works. These terms have a specific meaning and using them for something that's not covered by the definition dilutes their effectiveness.
On top of that, they even use "free and open source", which refers to certain moral freedoms rather than license mechanics.
I don't think I agree - is the source publicly available? Yes? Then it's open source. I understand that Open Source Foundation has written a definition, good for them - but they do not have the monopoly or final say on defining the term or how it's used(or rather - I don't see why should I recognize and accept their definition).
They came up with the term, and it's extremely widely used that way. And large parts of the software community will assume malice on your part if you present something as open source that doesn't fit the definition.
EDIT: IMHO it's in the best interest of everyone working on such licenses to come up with a new positive term and position that, instead of burning goodwill by trying to co-opt the "open source" label. (E.g. if I remember correctly, in the discussions around cloud software, "fair software" was one label used. Nice and positive word, not stepping on existing communities toes). And in reverse I hope people would be accepting of attempts with such new licenses if they keep the messaging straight.
It's well documented that the term was in use, referring to "source available" software no less, before they claim to have invented it. It might be a case of two groups coming up with the same term, but they were not the first.
> The Open Source Initiative's mission will be to own and defend the Open Source trademark, to manage the www.opensource.org resources, to develop branding programs attractive to software customers and producers, and to advance the cause of open-source software and serve the hacker community in other appropriate way
Which they since abandoned because "there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive" (and one suspects because the mark was already in use in trade of software, see the xent.com link above) https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
They have no special rights to the term open source. I wish people (including the OSI) would stop pretending otherwise. You can think that it's a good idea to use their definition without relying on falsehoods.
Nonsense. It's utter pedantry to pretend that a couple of isolated posts where they happen to use the words "open" and "source" together proved anything. In your first example, they're clearly using it as "open source-code", not "open-source code". Your second link doesn't work.
But the fact is, if it was a phrase in current use, you wouldn't just have one or two examples. There would be thousands. Where are all the other mentions of Caldera's "Open Source" software?
> It's utter pedantry to pretend that a couple of isolated posts where they happen to use the words "open" and "source" together proved anything. In your first example, they're clearly using it as "open source-code", not "open-source code". Your second link doesn't work.
In the body it is used (hyphens not added)
2x: “open-source” not followed by the word code.
3x: “open-source code”.
1x: “open source code”.
Plus in the 6 word tile as “open source” not followed by the word code. And open source is the main object.
Moreover it’s not just a throwaway phrase but a label they are using for their model
Caldera believes an open source code model benefits the industry in many ways.
They continue to be extremely interested in DOS and support our open-source technology direction
Caldera’s OEM and Channel Partners can utilize the open-source code models for DOS and Linux to create
I’m honestly not sure how it could be any clearer...
(I love it when I can copy and paste old arguments ;))
> But the fact is, if it was a phrase in current use, you wouldn't just have one or two examples. There would be thousands. Where are all the other mentions of Caldera's "Open Source" software?
It doesn't have to be extremely popular to be in use. The truth of the matter is that there wasn't much "open source" or "source available" software. The other truth of the matter is I have finite patience for trawling through old mailing lists looking for the term open source.
As you yourself note there is a bump dating to... 1975... the truth of this is the OSI used a term already in use and made it more popular, not that they invented it.
> Can you spot where the OSI appeared? The reason they couldn't get their trademark is because they had been so successful in promoting the term.
No, it was because the term is merely descriptive. It would also be because the term was already in use if the PTO noticed that (but they often don't - and I haven't tracked down the documents to check if they did).
> It doesn't have to be extremely popular to be in use. The truth of the matter is that there wasn't much "open source" or "source available" software.
That's outright nonsense. Just for comparison, Linux had already been around for the better part of a decade by that point, Red Hat had incorporated in 1993, and GNU/FSF might as well have been wrapping up the tour for their fifth album. To say that there wasn't much of the stuff in 1998 is either either ignorance, delusion, or both.
Open source software projects were a bajillion years old by that point, but nobody was calling them that, what with the term not yet having been invented and all. They were (begrudgingly!) "free software" until it was decided that mozilla.org would be a thing.
The word computer used to refer only to humans who did computation. If today you said I have a powerful computer, and brought out a human, other people would correctly claim that you are misleading them.
The phrase open source software has an extremely well-known meaning. Uses like this, which fraudulently claim to be open source software even though they fail to comply with the normal definition as used for over 20 years, is simply an exploitative fraud.
If they want to join the open source community, they would be very welcome. But trying to say that they're part of a community they're not is not okay. It's especially dangerous to the people who are not familiar with the law and might make big decisions for themselves based on falsehoods.
Today, trying to use that phrase in the way they're using it is deceptive.
As a private person you're free to use words as you wish, but in this case this is false advertising by a company. Go on try to sell some pork dish as "vegan" or "kosher" food and I'll look how fast you'll be brought to a court. This is no different.
You are being blinded by your political agenda. This source code is readily available and costs nothing, thus it is both open and free. Much of the machinery here is relevant to me, so I can learn about the nature of the system through the code and adapt design lessons to completely unrelated applications. Without this free and open code no such thing would be possible.
I understand that you have nothing but loathing and contempt for my approach to software development and you are welcome to promote your philosophy but you will find it impossible to bend simple language to your wishes as long as there are people who see things completely differently.
Microsoft disagrees with you, and has since at least 2001, well before they cared about open source software at all. They use the terms "source-available" or "shared source". So do... all the other big enterprises. They don't want to confuse people; they want the restrictions on licensing to be clear.
What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?
> What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?
Option a) Makeup a non-generic not already in use term and trademark it.
Option b) Just say "licensed under <well_known_license>".
What you're required to do to get the exclusivity you're looking for is well established in the rules we are all required to play by known as "the law".
We're also required, when communicating with each other, to communicate in good faith and to create a shared understanding. There's no law about that, it's just pointless to try and communicate if we can't do that.
Otherwise, I can say something like this and expect you to understand me: Most people believe that an onlooker underhandedly ignores an omphalos, but they need to remember how non-chalantly the cigar about an espadrille laughs out loud. When a menagé à trois for a labyrinth rejoices, a starlet living with a clodhopper feels nagging remorse. An unsightly impresario is darling. When the surly menagé à trois starts reminiscing about lost glory, a curmudgeonly bubble ceases to exist.
Or I can redefine water to mean any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid, and sell that to you, and claim you should've understood what I meant when you die.
What you're trying to argue for is more akin to redefining "clear liquid" to mean water, and then trying to argue I'm deceiving you when I sell you a "clear liquid" and it happens to be sulfuric acid.
The words "open source" have a plain pre-existing meaning. "Water" does not.
Now to go ahead and make your argument for you - this use of the term open source might be like if I went ahead and sold you (having to force this a bit, since I've failed to find a good example of a noun) insurance against kicking the bucket, and then I tried to define it as insurance against literally kicking buckets. Possibly you can find a better example, but that's the best I could come up with and
- "the bucket" clearly distinguishes the term from being merely descriptive
- Selling insurance against kicking buckets makes no sense, unlike "open source software" where "open" means "anyone can look at it"
- Kicking the bucket is a phrase with a much longer history than OSI defined open source software.
"Grey" and "water" are both valid words that compose in English. And yet "grey water" is a specific thing. If you showed up and started shouting, "But it's water! And it's grey!" about some water that had been contaminated with fecal matter, then you'd rightfully be shut down.
Nobody has a single authority on what words mean. That doesn't mean terms don't have established meanings, and it'll make things difficult for you if you insist on using them differently.
So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all? How about that "water" can now be used do describe any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid?
Go find your own words. "Shared source" has been used for literally decades to mean Defold's exact situation - why would you not use that?
>So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all
Yes you can, some people will hate it some people will like it, just like anything else
> So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today
This is actually a rather good description of what the OSI did. They took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.
Now people are getting mad when other people use the phrase "Donal Trump is a space alien" to literally mean that "Donald Trump is an alien from space".
(I can only assume that people have previously said that Donal Trump is a space alien... there are a lot of strange people in the world after all)
No, "open source" was not in common use at the time that OSI decided to use it. It's certainly not been used to mean anything except roughly OSI's definition until approximately two years ago, when Redis Labs decided to push the Commons Clause as being open source.
It was in use, both in software and in the world at large (especially the intelligence community). I suppose how it depends how you define "common" but "people use the term in official announcements and assume everyone knows what they mean" seems common enough to me.
OK, now find me regular usage of "open source", applied to software, by more than one person trying to sell something, as meaning something different from the OSI definition between approx 2000 and 2017.
You haven't shown that "open source" was in common use at the time OSI decided to use it (1988 is earlier than 1996), nor that it's been in common use as meaning something else when applied to software since then. One company trying to sell something doesn't make it common use, either - otherwise I could claim that my water is from a "free source" and declare that for all eternity referring to free source must mean it comes from my specific river.
Ah, thank you. Either way, one company using the term once before that doesn't mean that it is a phrase in common usage. It also doesn't mean that the term hasn't changed to mean something else in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of developers since them, and using it to mean its plain meaning will only ever cause confusion, and potentially result in people doing things you didn't want with the source code.
Epic, Microsoft, IBM, and hundreds of other companies, big and small, have been careful to avoid this issue specifically because there is an existing definition and it causes confusion.
> OSI […] took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.
If this is what happened, then they succeeded.
Absolutely nobody is arguing in good faith that there exists a community of people using the term “open source software” to mean something specific to them, which is different from how the OSI defines the term. This community of people, if it ever existed, certainly does not exist anymore. It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”. If it was really a confusing problem, they would call it something else; there are enough terms available. But it’s important to them to be able to fool people that it is OSI Open Source when in fact it isn’t, so they call it “open source”.
And then we have the literal-minded people who claim that word definitions are a question of dictionaries, historical precedent or etymology. These people are helping absolutely no-one, except the aforementioned corporations. Language is defined by current general use, and in current language, “open source software” means the OSI definition.
> It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”.
I've seen basically 0 evidence of this. As far as I've seen it's primarily people like me arguing that you can't lambast people for using words to mean what they mean (even if the specific combination of words has a now common second meaning), and people who naively use the term without understanding that there's a hoard of rabid programmers who insist that the phrase "open source" has been imbued with special meaning and using it otherwise is to summon the devil.
No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.
> people who naively use the term without understanding
> No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.
These are not people who made an innocent mistake. The product owner of Defold is commenting in this very thread (without any disclaimers, I might add). They want people to believe that it is really OSI “open source”, when in fact it isn’t.
I tend to believe that the product owner at Defold was genuinely unaware that there is this movement to redefine "open source" to mean something other than its plain meaning. After all, all "OSI open source" software is also "Plain Meaning open source", and it's the sort of pedantry that many people really don't give a fuck about.
It certainly didn't help them to use the term open source here, instead of everyone discussing the game engine they're releasing completely for free to the public with no strings attached and source code attached they're discussing the meaning of the term open source and accusing them of fraud.
It is not released to the public with no strings attached, that's the entire point here. There's very specific strings attached around some use of this work.
Not only do they not hold a trademark, they tried to acquire a trademark and failed because it was "too descriptive" (and I suspect because it was already in use).
The source to this web page is publicly viewable, right-click->view page source. That doesn't make it open source. It is a standard copyrighted object. Publicly viewable != open source.
I might be nitpicking, but viewing the source of this website HN does not give you the source code for Hacker News - there is plenty of other code working in the background that you can't see and which is required to make the website work.
Clicking on "view page source" is more akin taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower, while "open source" would be if France posted the architectural plans in the open. But just because the plans are out in the open doesn't mean that someone doesn't hold copyright to them.
The US government also defines the term "open source software" as allowing any use, both in top-level executive branch policies and in law. See my lengthy post elsewhere here for the details.
There is a term for that: source-available software. It covers all the cases where you can get the source, but the license is too restrictive to be classified as open-source.
"Open-source software" is a term, it has its meaning. Diluting it for the sake of marketing does not serve the community well.
Standard example. The source code for Windows 2000 is publicly available. Do you want to try telling Microsoft that it's open source? Don't break the accepted definition.
Was it published by Mirosoft officially? Then yeah, absolutely, I'd argue that Windows 2000 is open source. Was it leaked by someone through shady means? Then no, of course it isn't open source, since accessing it is not necessarily legal depending on the jurisdiction.
No, this is not open source. It is "source available".
When someone makes a blatantly false claim, we have another word for it: "fraud".
A Rose by Any Other Name May smell as sweet, but lying is still not okay. The phrase "open source software" has a meaning. If you just mean source available, say that instead.
No, that's not what fraud is. Let me focus on the US legal system (different jurisdictions are different, though I suspect other jurisdictions are similar).
Fraud is the intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. The government does NOT try to officially define every phrase in the language, nor does it need to. That's not how it works. The issues are, (1) does there appear to be intentional deception, and (2) Would that deception result in unfair/unlawful gain or the loss of the legal right? Issue 2 is true by definition (open source software as the term is generally used always allows people to use the software for any purpose, including commercial users, and this doesn't provide that right, so by definition the victim is losing a legal right). So we're really only asking the first issue - is there intentional deception? I presume you'd argue that there's no deception. Only a court can decide that for sure, but if someone uses a phrase likely to mislead most people, that's at least getting dangerously close.
So no, a government doesn't have to define the term. But even if you think that governments have to use the term that way... well, governments do define the term "open source software" just like OSI does. Again, I'll focus on the US, but this is by no means limited to the US.
The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo of August 8, 2016 (M-16-21) "Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software" https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... defines the term "open source software" as follows:
"Open Source Software (OSS): Software that can be accessed, used, modified, and shared by anyone. OSS is often distributed under licenses that comply with the definition of “Open Source” provided by the Open Source Initiative (https://opensource.org/osd) and/or that meet the definition of “Free Software” provided by the Free Software Foundation (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)" Notice that it can be "used by anyone" and it specifically references the OSI's definition. That memo included a mandate to release a certain amount of code as OSS - which meant the government had to define the term, and yes, they used the normal definition for it.
That OMB memo cites the US Department of Defense (DoD)'s official policy on open source software that was released in 2009: https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/FOSS/2009OSS.... - it says in 2.2.b.1.iv "Open source licenses do not restrict who can use the software or the fields of endeavor in which the software can be used." So the US DoD thinks that commercial use is by definition allowed by open source licenses. This wasn't even the first government memo about open source software; they had another one in 2003.
I've been citing executive branch policies, but it's also in US law. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2018 at https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2810... section 875 requires the DoD to participate more fully in a "pilot program for open source software", and cites the policy and definition of OMB M-16-21 ("Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software") dated August 8, 2016. Yes, that's a US law, and it by reference defines "open source software" using the OSI definition. That is, commercial use must be allowed.
So yes, the US government DOES have a definition of open source software, and it requires permission for any field of endeavor, just like OSI's definition does. It's been that way for almost 20 years.
Caveat: I am NOT a lawyer. But I've cited my sources, look them up if you have questions.
Thank you for the feedback! It was never our intention to step on any toes or misrepresent Defold. Defold is a free (doesn't cost anything) and open (you can extend and modify it) game engine with a permissive license and we invite the community to contribute on GitHub.
Not to defend the word choice by King, but IMHO the original sin was the definition of the generic-sounding phrase "open source" as anything other than "publicly readable source code". It's quite counterintuitive to anyone who knows what the words "open" and "source" mean in English that "open source" means anything beyond "the source is open". Perhaps it's a losing battle and a different name should be chosen?
Honestly, I think you are mistaken because of a lack of contextual knowledge. The reality of game engines are that if someone were to take this source code and make another game engine, editor, or both out of it with some significant change or added feature, then almost any such change would tend to propagate through the code base so as to make this clause useless. Take the scripting core, for example. Make that work with a different language, multiple languages, or different libraries. Now watch how that changes the code. It would actually take a large effort to preserve enough to make that clause apply.
What this is about is the potential for naive copies where someone takes the codebase and tries to make essentially the exact same product with no significant changes. That would be a source of confusion and competition and not really serve anyone.
It is great to be enthusiastic about open source, but objecting to people sharing source code is rarely a good idea. I openly challenge anyone to make a functioning, useful fork of this project that would leave enough in place for this clause to apply.
If you use standard, well known and industry accepted terms and then totally morph the meaning then it cripples the whole industry.
You are talking about game engines and their complexities, which makes it hard to comply. There are compliant full fledged operating systems out there (I am sure you have heard of a few) that are actually "open source". So I am not sure why any company should get away with using the well known term in a misleading way.
You wish that these terms meant those things, but they do not. How is it that you come to speak for an industry? The source code is readily available and costs nothing. That is what open and free mean. Licensing is a different issue.
Let's talk about the operating system angle. When I went to work at NeXT in 1993 there was a lot of GPL code in the system. By 1999 as Mac OS X approached release there was a frantic effort to remove all GPL code in favor of BSD or Apache licensed alternatives or in some cases nothing at all was favorable. If Mac OS had continued to make use of GPL code and components that could have made a big difference to the whole software development community in a strategic sense. Instead this kind of zealotry resulted in barriers. Not only do you not have the control you imagine, but your ongoing efforts to draw these lines makes everything that much more difficult and unpleasant.
geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil.
A company gave away their app making tool for free, and these people are sitting in front of their keyboard talking shit about how "this is subverting the definition of 'open source'", seriously?
Also what's so evil about the clause:
> "You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine" does not meet (6).
What's so wrong about businesses trying to give back to the community while protecting themselves against the likes of Microsoft and Amazon who will naturally take the code and monetize if there's no clause that restricts anti competition?
Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source. There are many reasons people open source their projects, for transparency, for giving assurance to the ecosystem, etc. By trying to box the definition down to a single very narrow minded idea, you're actually hurting the growth of open source instead of helping.
Seriously, this +100000000%. King giving this much to the community with such a tiny clause that most people won't mind (you can't take their engine, make a change, and resell it) is so pedantic that I feel like there will be really nobody who is seriously going to use the project who will care. I'm super excited as a developer, I can work to get some features I want in here now!
Epic Games also giving a lot to the community and now only charge projects after $1,000,000 in profits. Yet they don't try to sell their EULA as "almost OSS license".
And I appreciate them for the work they've done too! But that's not an exact one-to-one here. There's no point in attacking a project that has an honest desire to give to the community like this post has been doing.
So how exactly this is not one-to-one if we don't care about terms here?
95% of game developers will never gonna make $1M from their pet project so it's no different whatever engine code is licensed under EULA or proprietary license with different name.
Because the engine is proprietary in Epic land, and it's not here. Here I can make any changes I want and still release the engine as a fork. I can't sell that fork. In the case of the Epic engine, you're not allowed to fork it at all.
> Excluding commercial use is not helping the growth of OSS, it is falsely claiming to be OSS.
Is anything less than BSD or MIT license not open source then? I am all for it, but you are publishing some of your work under GNU which mean I can't use in one of my projects without publishing the source code under GNU. Why these restrictions are acceptable but not non-commercialisation?
> If you use components that are licensed under GPLv3, then you are required to license the complete application the contains the GPL components under the GPL as well.
It seems to be more restrictive to me than the OP's license.
Both Wikipedia & Oxford appear for some reason to adopted what is at best a subjective understanding of the term “open source” — since no one in plain English would ever think some person, place, or thing being “open” would mean free to take and use as desired.
Plain English is important. People are lazy. People do not like non-obvious meanings. Regardless of intent, any one prompting idea that “open source” means anything other than “viewable source code” needs to reflect on the clarity of their communication and the reality they may be seen as an chest pounding elitist; which to me is not in the spirit of the idles the claim to believe.
Anybody interested in "open source" is a programmer, so I hope they have a more in depth knowledge of the terminology than "plain English". Especially on the license part to include & distribute libraries they are using in their own project.
HN is not the ideal place to discuss game development news, you will find that feeling a lot around here, sites like Gamedev or the now gone Flipcode are more into it.
Its number one reason I try to avoid any open source project. I actually respect those brave souls thats involved in open source project.
Thousands good and one tiny bad thing, you get scrutinized to hell. You literally have to satisfy everybody otherwise theres gonna be a vocal minority(or majority) pointing out how wrong you are(usually due to difference in priorities).
honestly, its mentally and emotionally draining to deal with these.
And its also applicable to HN community. Any time theres a tiny bit of good thing done by somebody/some company, theres always gonna be someone pointing out the bad things that someone/company did.
You either have to be full good, or just dont bother being a good guy.
Couldn't agree more. Some of the reactions here are why most sane people avoid the open source community. Ultimately, these sort of reactions hurt open source in the long run by discouraging companies and individuals from releasing their source.
The idea that open source is being "hurt" by asking for companies not to misrepresent their products says a lot more about you than it does anyone else.
Quite a remarkable lack of IANAL flags for a lot of people talking about false advertising/trademark law...IANAL but the minimal data I have suggests the phrase “open source” has very little protection (not strictly claimed on OSI website, no major track record of being defended in court, broadly accepted vague definition, unlikely to damage the trademarked brand’s image/rep).
Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
I think people have just figured out that "IANAL" goes without saying in any online public discussion, unless for whatever reason it happens to be in a forum where arbitrary participants are especially likely to be lawyers. This is not a commercial context where fraud would be a concern, and even if the speaker was a lawyer there is no reasonable expectation of any attorney-client relationship between random participants in a public discussion. "IANAL" flags are superfluous.
> Very different from falsely claiming the release is OSI compliant or whatever the legalese is...
The de facto accepted way to say that a license is OSI compliant is to refer to it as "open source".
> geez, what's up with all these armchair open source experts on HN? Looks like too many people on this thread thinks this is evil.
This is evil because it's intentional false advertisement. That's fine when some company which is totally new to the field doing it, but these guys have their code published on GitHub for years and they know the difference.
This is no different from situation when surveillance sold under names like Patriot Act.
> Lastly, who the hell cares what some website called opensource.org says what open source is? This is all subjective, and from my point of view, if the source code is open, it is "open" source.
Yeah and if I decide that my restaurant make amazing pork dishes I am totally allowed to call them Vegan, Halal or Kosher. Right?
Then we'll have amazing products like zoom call their software end2end encrypted. Oh actually it's already happen. And we also have this amazing software called Telegram which is totally encrypted except it isn't (by default). And Apple is absolutely cannot get access to your encryption key, unless you enable this shiny cloud backup option.
The source code is open, different people have different opinion about the definition of "open source".
if someone calls a pork sandwich "vegan", that's objectively false. Not the case for the concept of open source because the definition is murky and I refuse to follow some authority's definition of what open source is.
You’re jumping from argument to argument. You explicitly argued that since it was free, nobody should be able to claim anything wrong with how it was presented.
Now you’re instead claiming that the term “open source” was perfectly justified, since the definition is “murky”.
So which is it? Either the term “open source” is fitting, in which case it should not matter if they charge for it or not, or it’s only OK since they don’t charge for it.
They have every right to have such clauses in their license. But they implicate that this license is "permissive", and mentions "Apache 2.0" - giving false impression of the actual contents of the license.
Such a noncommercial clause means that this does not really follow the Free Software definition and Open Source definition of "open source".
The license page (https://defold.com/license/) says "derived from the popular and permissive Apache 2.0 license". It never say that it is the Apache 2.0 license.
It then goes on to show the difference very clearly, and as you can see the only difference from the Apache 2.0 license is that additional clause about non-commercialisation of the engine+editor package. You are still free to sell your Defold games, sell your Defold add-ons and sell your Defold tutorials.
The frontpage right now says "Defold is free and open source software released under a permissive license derived from the popular Apache 2.0 License."
So it at the very least claims to be a "permissive" license. The non-commercial restrictions are not mentioned there, one has to read on.
The vast majority of developers that would be interested in this engine only care about building games with it and selling those without any worry, without any interest in selling any modifications to the engine itself as a new package. They are presumably the target audience for whom this can be considered a permissive license.
Both popular commercial game engines out there (Unity and Unreal) have huge markets for all kind of engine extensions. Almost all game developers use said extensions and many are interested in selling them.
* You are free to commercialise any software created using Defold
* You are free to commercialise any plugin, extension or tool created for use with Defold
* You are free to modify Defold and you are not required to share the changes
* You are free to distribute original or modified (derivative) versions of Defold)
I will not debate you on that one. According to the Open Source Definition (https://opensource.org/osd) Defold is only 90% open source. It's a lot better than the 0% it was yesterday.
Like seriously according to your comment history you're product owner of Defold. So if you're care of success of Defold why do you need this false advertisement?
If your company worried about someone making money off editor you can just keep this part proprietary while releasing the engine under OSS-compatible license. There is plenty of "open core" projects out there.
Yes, you can't sell GameEngine itself.
Basically this is Apache 2.0 license with a point about "you can't sell the engine itself". Here is licence with Diffs from Apache 2.0:
https://defold.com/license/
After what AWS did with Elasticsearch, I think a lot more projects are going to start being released like this. In a world where tech behemoths can choose to throw a hundred engineers at an open source project and replicate all the features an independent developer (or group of developers) can provide "on top" to make a living, it becomes very hard to sustain yourself.
Not strictly open-source, but I see it as a defense mechanism in order to survive.
* You are free to commercialise any software created using Defold
* You are free to commercialise any plugin, extension or tool created for use with Defold
* You are free to modify Defold and you are not required to share the changes
* You are free to distribute original or modified (derivative) versions of Defold
* You are given a license to any patent that covers Defold
You can sell anything you want created with or related to Defold, but not package the engine+editor and sell those.
There was plenty of objection to that point of view here on HN and yet you think you own the discussion? Wow, now I'm an official HN rebel because I think sharing means openness and zero cost means free. I hope your efforts to make the world understand the free and open software development scene is hostile, mean spirited, defensive, and always ready and anxious to play word games works out for the best.
If you're interested in game engines using Lua, please also consider Planimeter's Grid Engine (https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ and https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk) which has been in steady development for about a decade, having even more features than Defold and Solar2D, such as out-of-the-box multiplayer with client-server prediction, Tiled support, configuration bindings, and much more that you'd have to roll yourself in both engines! (and it's MIT licensed to boot.)
No other game engine in Lua is going to provide dedicated server support out of the box besides Grid.
It's all also built on the latest version of LÖVE, which gives you access to all of the software in that ecosystem, too. It's the only full fledged game engine on LÖVE that we know of.
It's less known as we don't do much advertising and have had far fewer contributors, but our focus has been consistent over the years.
Because we have fewer resources, we also work very closely with those using the software if you have any questions.
While a collection of game engines using Lua seem to be tapering off in active development, such as Polycode, Corona, and perhaps now Defold, Planimeter's Grid engine is actively used by the group for game development projects, and will continue to be supported into the future, bringing commercial support in 2021.
No, I'm sorry, most of our users are hobbyists with projects that we're not aware of the state of for the most part.
We hope to improve the engine to better serve the indie and hobbyist gamedev community with tools that aren't available elsewhere and if we hear about any projects one would like to showcase, we'd be happy to feature them!
Thank you! Yes. The codebase is also segmented by client, server, and shared portions, of which the client portion can be removed for server-side only deployments to AWS and others, and the server removed to hide back-end implementations in the case of multiplayer games that don't support listen servers.
I'll keep your feedback in mind since I hope to improve the marketing collateral.
To s_y_n_t_a_x: Yes, we do have a discord at https://discord.com/invite/Gbj4jnv, and maps scale by visibility. The engine allows you to seam together maps which can be streamed and loaded and unloaded in real-time.
Planimeter uses the tech for its MMO flagship project.
Can't wait to patch more native moonscript support into a fork :evil:
If you want to see an overview of a somewhat typical and polished mobile game done with Defold, here's a non-King dev showing off his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4pJ8A3YS4
Also, in relevant news, Corona (the other major Lua game engine[1]) is also being open-sourced, and renamed to Solar2D: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326462
[1] with dev ecosystem of extensions, build services etc - without that Love2D might also qualify