this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.

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[โ€“] AProfessional@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code,[1] design documents,[2] or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

[โ€“] AstridWipenaugh@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

And then later on...

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.

Unreal Engine is technically open source, because it's source code is made available to the general public. But it is licensed under a restrictive EULA instead of any of the normal licenses you'd expect for an open source project (MIT, Apache, GPL3, etc).

This is definitely pedantic, but "open source" is a colloquial term, not a technical one. Most people mean FOSS when they say open source, but the terms aren't exactly equivalent. The license that governs the code is really the only part that actually matters.