I'm sorry, is this in any way legal? Did they just tell people to delete their games? Like... I'm pretty sure this kind of rug pull would destroy any company that relies on this engine. 14 days for a full re-write is insane.
Actually, I might know someone who can answer this. Or, at least they'll have to figure it out. I didn't realize this was that platform. A friend started a company last year to build a game based on this, and I'm pretty sure they already released said game.
They're gonna reach out and see how far this extends. According to 3.B, the game would be a "derivative work", and as such shouldn't be subject to this requirement. They've already started working on replacing it with Godot.
I doubt it's legal and it will certainly destroy companies. And what makes it worse, is that my best guess is that they are going to capitalize on this move. Maybe repackage it as some other high priced software. Either way, the whole company should be ashamed.
I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood the test of time.
Godot is MIT licensed, and as such this 100% can't happen. Absolute worst case is they limit or remove future versions, but MIT basically means "mention that this was MIT licensed." Do that, and they can't stop you from doing anything with it. Repackage and resell it? sure. Wrap it in your own commercial project? Go for it. You just can't stop someone else from using the source code as originally released.
Godot is MIT-licensed so no, they can't arbitrarily revoke your license and force you to stop developing your game.
What they could theoretically do is stop developing it, or change the license for all newer versions of the engine to one that would force you to pay to use it (or similar). In which case Godot would most likely be forked on the same day and a big part of the current developers would just move over to the fork.
Changing the license would be very difficult, AIUI they would need to convince everyone who had already contributed to consent to the change in licensing.
Since Godot is MIT-licensed (which only requires a copyright notice and a note that says 'this is using code from a thing under the MIT license') changing the license would be trivial.
Essentially they could release "Godot current+1" under a fully proprietary (or GPL for that matter) license and keep the notice that's required by "Godot current" and they would be compliant, since "Godot current+1" would be a derived work from "Godot current".
The requirement to get consent from all previous contributors only applies if they would want to remove that copyright notice. For sofware that is under more restrictive licenses, like GPL, further restrictions apply and then it would be necessary to get an ok from all copyright holders to change the license to something that is incompatible with the GPL (or between incompatible GPL-versions, like GPLv2->GPLv3).
edit: While it would be ok to do this change from a licensing perspective it would of course most likely piss off quite a lot of the current contributors who didn't agree with the change, and they would most likely move to the aforementioned fork that would get started immediately.
> I use Godot and now I'm wondering if this can't happen at Godot as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to Unity. You pay but at least they have sort of stood the test of time.
No, it most definitely is not time to do that. This can't happen to Godot, since FOSS licenses are irrevocable. It can happen to Unity. You'd be moving from a zero chance to a small but nonzero chance if you did that.
I really would not think above switching to unity considering in the past few months they have layed off hundreds of employees, the CEO called game developers "fucking idiots", and they merged with a malware distributor
