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Godot [...] is open-source. By proxy, Slay the Spire 2 is also open-source.
Written by somebody who naively thinks open-source means: the source code can be viewed.
Typical game journalism incompetence.
Yeah unfortunate. At least the first comments there corrected them.
There was some asshole on the threadiverse saying that copy-left licenses weren't open source, since you weren't allowed to profit off the free code.
I say this at the risk of signal posting this regressive view to say that anybody should be allowed to view and learn from software, and benefitting from such work while closing off future access is shitty. Find some other way to make money that doesn't involve freeloading off of someone's contribution to community.
You are allowed to charge for most libre-licensed software, but of course in practice if it's popular enough somebody else will just build it and undercut you.
I do wish there were more institutions funding FOSS work though it can be hard to measure the benefits and progress for individual projects.
Some countries fund it -- QGIS for example is used and developed by governments as an alternative to ESRI products. Maybe there are other examples?
I was using QGIS in work to simplify geometries of US postal code geo jsons and it was an impressive bit of kit. I enjoyed how 2002 it looked, but underneath it was an absolute machine.
Open source does literally mean that. But it doesn't mean that everything you build using open source is itself open source by proxy.
Edit: ah, I see now, you meant to say "written by someone who thinks source code being viewable means it's open source".
No, my wording was intentional. I was describing the journalist’s direction of inference, not asserting the definition in reverse. They saw the term “open source” and mentally reduced it to “the source code is viewable”, which is why I phrased it that way.
Open source does literally mean that.
It means that PLUS many more conditions. If you remove those additional conditions it's not open source anymore but "source available".
To be precise: open source implies source-available, but source-available does not imply open source.
Heh your "precise" statement is literally what I said:
Open source does literally mean [source code can be viewed]...[it's not the case that] source code being viewable means it's open source
Cheers.
What you're talking about is "source-available." I.e. being able to read source code but not having licensing rights to redistribute or make changes.
"Open-source" means that being able to modify and distribute changes is built into the license of the code.
For example, Minecraft Java is source-available in that decompiling Java bytecode is trivial - enough so that tools exist which can easily generate a source code dump. However, actually distributing that source code dump is technically illegal and falls under piracy, so it isn't open source.
Edit: I didn't see your edit, this comment is kind of pointless, oh well
Yeah, people keep correcting me by reiterating exactly what I'm saying lol
I’m happy for Godot’s commercial success here. But what’s this weird attempt at connecting open source to piracy? You can de-compile lots of Unity games too. Wtf.
Yeah I guess you could argue that not encrypting or obfuscating the binary makes it a bit faster to create a pirated version but it doesn't really effect piracy rates beyond that.
I'm just happy to see a FOSS engine being noticed as important to the game's success.
it's more so that godot has no built in way to obfuscate source code, and likely never will
Unity, and C# in general, are TRIVIAL to decompile (not accounting for obfuscators).
That il2cpp stuff gives me a big headache though. I guess you could consider that a kind of obfuscation.
For whatever reason Slay the Spire 2 became this flashpoint for this discussion, even though, from all I've seen, the devs never made any statements complaining about it. Maybe it was fans getting things spoiled?
Godot is MIT, so open-sourceness does not trickle down.
Dang. Maybe I should buy it and finally learn godot.
Maybe woosh, but... It's free...
Edit: No woosh, just me stupid
... you really didn't grasp he meant buying the game?
Great to see Godot getting more adoption by successful indie games! Slay the Spire was already a masterpiece, excited to see what they do with the sequel. This is the kind of success story that helps the whole indie ecosystem grow. 🎮
I clicked because I was confused about what using Godot has to do with piracy. I read more of the article and comments after becoming irritated by the misrepresentation of what using an open source engine entails.
How often are articles purposefully "wrong" just to increase engagement?
Always
Godot is open-source, by proxy, slay the spire is also open-source.
Is it?
Sounds like bullshit to me. Godot is under MIT license, so anyone is free to re-license any derivative work.
Edit: I read the rest of the article. The author has no idea what they are writing. It's not even internally consistent. If the game was open source already why would people be decompiling the binaries? To get a worse version of the source code with automatically derived variable names and no comments?
The best part of no comments is figuring out what everything does yourself
Looks like there are already interesting projects coming out of the de-compile like an unofficial android launcher:
https://github.com/Ekyso/StS2-Launcher
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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