It's sometimes a little mind-boggling that the FSF has been around only a couple months more than I have been around. I'm not even sure I'd have made computing of any kind a career if it hadn't been for free software myself.
Surely this is illegal? As a company why would you even want to know. What is an HR department going to do with this information?
The only use of this must be some kind of discrimination, right? Like "Oh you're in a same-sex relationship, remind us to not give you any time off if your partner goes to the hospital."
Where Unity users pay to have the logo taken off of their splash screens, and Unreal forces it on successful titles Godot users love putting splash screens on, even though they don't have to.
It is retroactive, games that are already made today and already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.
10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.
Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.
These are a little different. So these "dual licensed" products work like this:
You get a GPL version of the code, which is free and nobody can charge you for, ever.
If you want to use the software in a way that is not GPL compatible you can opt for the other, paid for, license.
This works in some cases, but in the case of Godot (assuming we were to do something like this) is the MIT license, which already gives you the rights to do whatever you want.
And even in the GPL case, if the other license terms became too odious you could simply switch to the GPL version, and not pay.
You can access the source code to unreal engine when you get a license, but the terms are not by any stretch of the imagination open source. You wouldn't be able to freely share your modifications for instance.
That's not possible with something that is open source. If it has a "dual license" that means you can pick which license to apply. You just pick the one that doesn't make you pay.
Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users.
An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)
You're contradicting your own points. If it is not a problem that Unreal can change their license for next versions because you can use the old one (which is now unsupported and not worked on) that is fine.
For Godot, if we were to stop developing it (and I'd like to note that Godot is one of the most active projects on Github right now) you would still have the version you have now.
What is the difference between Epic not working on a game engine you use or an open source project not working on a game engine you use? Except that with Godot at least you could work on it yourself if you wanted to.
Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically. The whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks if you have reasonable testing. For a game that is not possible.
Nobody can take away your rights under the MIT license, there's no legal mechanism to do that. You are protected, fully, from shit like this.