Hi everyone, I have been wondering about what if the Unity engine was Open Source? This would be amazing if it actually happened.You would be able to tweak things like the engine itself and many other things. Would there be any potential downsides to this if it actually happened?
I have been wondering what if sports cars were free? This would be amazing if it actually happened. You would be able to get all the Porches and Ferrarris you want. Would there be any potential downsides to this if it actually happened?
Yep. Unity would make no money.
They would probably stop supporting it, because they couldn’t afford to.
Resulting in the death of Unity.
also… I would very much like a free Ferrari
What would cause them to make no money? The Open Source License allows you to use it for commercial purposes and even sell it. Here is a bit from the Open Source FAQ.
Yes… But they would be giving away their product for free. Means making no money.
Ok, wrong idea. Next one.
seriously though.
Porsche and Ferrari do give away their cars. Only you’d have to be a president or very very famous.
I would love more reasonably priced source license however.
Considering the HUGE amount of time and effort that apparently goes into fixing bugs and testing quality and all that stuff, I would imagine the Unity sourcecode is a HUGE pile of really complicated, professionally written and often advanced code which would be extremely daunting for all but expert programmers to do anything with. I don’t think making it open source will suddenly open up some kind of hidden accessibility to everyone.
You’ve got your preconceptions backward there, professionally written code is most often not that advanced, and definitely easy to maintain. It’s beginner level code that is unmaintainable.
Are you really this clueless, or just playing the troll?
The price is reasonable considering the risks involved in giving away source.
I belive a troll, the only other option is he is having a brain fart. Nobody is that stupid.
There’s no risk in giving away source at all, the price for source licenses is usually to justify the additional support that comes along with it as well as the license restrictions lifting, not for any kind of risk. If it was you’d need to add an easy 0 to the current price.
Companies steal source code all the time. Most of the time there is no lawsuit because its not worth it; it usaually ends in a stalemate or the theif changes ten lines and calls it their own.
100% true. You wouldn’t the crap going around these days. I see crap code all of the time on GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc. It’s really maddening.
Yea, no, that just doesn’t happen actually.
Companies do quite often pick tiny bits of code here and there, but companies don’t license engines, and then help third party steal the whole engine.
No one cares about source code, it has no value and is grossly overrated. Bits of code aren’t just transposable to other projects in most case and stealing a whole engine is blantantly visible.
And no, companies don’t just “not sue”, if someone steals their whole source, they very much do sue agressively and for less than that.
I never meant they steal the whole engine and claim it their own. Many companies DO take bits and pieces or other work and include them. I meant mostly all the R&D; they can now see how Unity did their particle system and port it over to their engine etc.
~lanDog
Can you cite an example?
There is 0 value in bits pieces of unity either, it’s just a well put together system made of pretty basic blocks, except for a few things it doesn’t really offer anything that isn’t clearly described in blogs on the net.
TC Particles was done by a single person and comes with full source for a few hundred $, who’d want to pay 100K to license unity and “steal” shuriken?