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I saw that the Unreal Engine is going open-source on github (see link1 and link2) and that made me wonder: "is open-sourcing a previously commercial engine a smart move?"

What's the benefit to Epic Games in open-sourcing their core code in this manner? How can they not be concerned about people stealing parts of it just because they put a copyright and license statement on the code?

It seems like there has to be a catch. How does releasing their source code benefit Epic Games?

user3455340
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  • You see only one part(community getting the benefits), but there is the other part(project getting the benefits of the community contributions). – Silviu Burcea Mar 24 '14 at 12:45
  • [Making money with Open Source as a developer?](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/100685/making-money-with-open-source-as-a-developer) is probably even better duplicate, as it provides a very comprehensive [answer](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/100706/31260) – gnat Mar 24 '14 at 12:55
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    Unless I seriously misunderstood something, Unreal Engine 4 isn't going open source in the usual sense of the word. Every customer gets full source code, and that's great, but you still have to pay at least once for a license to use it, if you make money from it Epic gets royalties, and you can't (legally) fork it and give the source code away. That's not even freeware, let alone open source. Or are you misusing "open-sourcing" to mean "giving a lot of people access to the source code"? –  Mar 24 '14 at 12:59
  • @gnat Totally not a duplicate, since there are many more possible reasons to open source something, not only money (though some answers may be interesting in the more general context of this question). – thorsten müller Mar 24 '14 at 13:01
  • @thorstenmüller http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/194476/someone-flagged-my-question-as-already-answered-but-its-not – gnat Mar 24 '14 at 13:03
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    currently you need to make an account at their website and pay $19/month plus 5% revenue before you can access the source code, that isn't free in any sense of the word – ratchet freak Mar 24 '14 at 13:11
  • For much open source software it can be functionally impossible to tell if somebody is using it illicitly. This is not going to be the case with something like Unreal, which is monolithic enough to have many aspects immediately obvious in the final product. – Phoshi Mar 24 '14 at 13:22
  • Having to pay a fee has nothing to do with whether it is open source or not. What matters is that you get a copy and what you can do with it once you have it. – Elin Mar 24 '14 at 16:07

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You seem to misunderstand a key part: the unreal engine remains a commercial engine. This means that they will still get the licensing fees from every developer and each game sold. The EULA even specifically states that you can't share the source with anyone that isn't also a licensee.

The major benefit is that there are now programmers that are paying you to get the chance to upgrade the engine.

As for discovering if part of the engine was used in another project, I'll refer to this question. Mainly embedded string and residual debug information is key part in discovering illicit use of open source parts.

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ratchet freak
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  • This raises me a question: is in IT the know-how the real value or the bulk of code written? It seems that even if you have the code, you don't know how that was written and you can't simply read it and write another one which does the same thing, right? – Marco A. Mar 25 '14 at 09:59