I think it's worth noting that Unreal Engine's source code is available free of charge, and they actively engage with the developer community on GitHub. It's an interesting cousin of Open Source, but nobody talks about this sort of business model.
Unfortunately, a lot of people (including myself) value true freedom, which neither Unreal nor Unity provide; on the other hand, you are guaranteed that both of these projects will not die soon, which is something that open source projects suffer.
> a lot of people (including myself) value true freedom
By all indications, the people who value this particular flavor of no-true-Scotsman'd "true freedom" is tiny and shrinking. The Apache License and MIT/X11 licenses have more or less supplanted the GPL and other hard-copyleft licenses in modern development communities. When I started writing open source, the GPL was almost the default largely because Linux used it as such; I don't remember the last time I saw a GPL project, or even LGPL, that I cared to use.
This is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned; I'd rather grant the freedom to do great things with the stuff I write regardless of whether somebody wants to hand it back to me. It doesn't hurt me, so, whatever.
You're presenting a diversion here. Both permissive and copyleft licenses are free software licenses (that is to say, the "true freedom" that you sardonically hold in contempt) as recognized by the FSF.
UE4 is neither free, nor open source by any definition. It is source-available and gratis, instead.
Since the early days of home computing I used a mixture of free and commercial software.
Back in the days we had program listings, public domain, freeware, shareware, ....
Then GPL came along and many adopted. Personally I had a phase where I was 100% GPL and writing stuff like M$.
That is all gone for me now and I am even typing this on a Windows 8.1 system, but I do acknowledge that most likely Linux wouldn't ever happened if it wasn't for GNU and the whole (L)GPL eco-system.
Many of the open source advocates that are anti-GPL forget that without it, probably the choice today would have been between commercial UNIX systems and Windows NT.
Android extensions outside AOSP, LLVM derivatives for embedded systems, GPGPUs and most recently Swift are good examples of what happens when you join commercial interests with free code.
> Many of the open source advocates that are anti-GPL forget that without it, probably the choice today would have been between commercial UNIX systems and Windows NT.
I certainly am not complaining about Unreal. The amount of resources needed to create and maintain such beast is quite high, so the chances of having something similar being open source are minimal. I'm fine with that license. It's already more open that a lot of the stuff out there.
Sure I wish we had Linux-like software for everything.
