Prospects For Open-Source Engines Now That UE4/Source2/Unity Are Free?

[Ansla]

As far as I'm aware Unreal has always given source level access to it's licensees, certainly if nothing else it was always an option.

Big corporations and governments can also access MS Window's source code, but that doesn't mean anybody can. Unreal could have done the same, the small guys get a blob while the big guys get the source.

The difference is this time around instead of Licensees keeping their changes in private forks to themselves Epic decided to make themselves a proper upstream.

And sure you can blab on about github and git and such, but that is irrelevant to the discussion of why Epic 'opened' up UE4, it only answers how Epic was able to do so.

You think that if github didn't exist Unreal would have went through all the trouble for setting up a public repository? Or setup a perforce server and give out user accounts to all the indies?

Also for a very long time games and game engines have given out mod toolkits under non-commercial licenses for the mod scene to play with, the difference here is more that the existence of the indies has shifted things from non-commercial to pay us later.

Are you implying those mod kits came with full source to the entire engine?