I’ve always wondered why unity doesn’t share its source code with pro members, whats so special that they cant release the source to paying pro members? for $1500 plus you’d think they would…
Because that’s not their business model. You can get the source code but it’s a separate license.
–Eric
Which probably costs a couple thousand more. What I guess i wanna know is why is it the way they do business.
?? what? no this must be a troll.
If they gave the source code then you can build to any platform! even Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii.
Why when they can sell it for even more and get way more? I would most definitely not value Unity source code as low as 1.5 thousand.
Yeah… yeah i know…
I dont think its that simple…
Its late, i just had the question on my mind, i shoulda put more thought into it b4 i asked…
Are you kidding? Most commercial graphic engines don’t give you source code. To get source code would require $250000~$500000 for most of them (id Tech 5, UDK/UE, CryEngine) even for small fries like Unigine (which cost 5 times more to license - $5000+ last I heard) wouldn’t give you source code unless you fork overe $250000.
As matter of fact, show me one commercial engine (no open source!) that would give you source code for under $1500. With exception to a few low quality garbage engines (such as C4 Engine 
) there aren’t many, if at all.
I would have said Torque, but that’s open source now…
–Eric
You will find that it is ether open source or very expensive.
ya !its true
Actually it’s not true; they could simply not include the source for building to those platforms. Source code isn’t all or nothing.
–Eric
Unity is a For-Profit entity, in today’s Social society it’s not a stretch at all for their entire Source Code once “Given away” to Pro users to end up on a Torrent and a mod community would openly tinker with their code and publish their own variants IE Unix/Linux, still using some form of the Unity name, and completely undermining all the hard years of work they have put in to this engine.
Source code expensive Licences also come with Iron clad non distribute agreements, as they are trusting you with the “Baby” of their company. For the current model Unity has in place, it would destroy it top to bottom inside…oh 1 year i would guess if included in Pro License tiers.
Why on earth would they give you access to source code for $1500?
What if some one wrote it(which would most certainly happen)
What if someone wrote what? Exporters for consoles? That’s highly complex and you’d no doubt save money (not to mention a huge amount of time) by just paying UT whatever they’re asking for them.
–Eric
Well, I did also mentioned the ones that let you get source code for under $1500 are usually garbage.
touche.
Personally, I’m not at all interested in the source code. It would just take days and days … probably weeks of my time to get into it. And what for? The beauty of Unity is in its smooth abstraction and encapsulation. You want to write a shader with your own special lighting sauce? No problem. You actually want to be productive but need a shader that does some special texture processing? You can use a surface shader.
There might be some very special use cases every now and then where having the source code might be helpful. “Look, don’t touch”, you know? Like: How they did stuff with RAKNET would be an example that immediately comes to mind. But the only reason anyone could ever have been interested in that was because they kind of failed a little on providing “just the right level of abstraction” in their networking API (IMHO, they should have made networking a little more complex at the benefit of having it less restricted to some use cases I didn’t really care about - but that’s just because I believe multiplayer is so inherently complex that trying to do it when you can’t handle that kind of complexity will just be frustrating anyways).
But if they included the source code, in the end, some people might be really stupid and add their own little hacks here and there and then end up in update-nightmares … and they’d probably congest any support channels that UT has.
So … I’m very happy they keep their source code to themselves … and … in case I ever really need source access, I know I can get it (plus, I’d probably budget to pay for one of UT’s Ninjas to help me do anything useful with those gazillion lines of code 
).
This.
Their source code is worth way more than $1500. So either they increase the cost of Pro to some ridiculous amount, or they sell it as a separate license.
1 Like
Why do we need source code access? Unity is like this magic box that spits out awesome. Having the code would ruin that.