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Comment by xando | Hacker News Reader

Hey, this looks really good. Thanks for the good work.

A question. Please don't get it wrong.

How you going to maintain that? Recently more than anything I'm more afraid of investing my time in some tool will go away in the near future. While UE and Unity 3D are not perfect, neither free (or even cheap). But those teams have all the money to support next releases, and I have some guarantee that they will exist next year.

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Perfectly valid question. You are right, while there is a high chance that UE and Unity will be maintained, there is no guarantee. In any single person project, especially noncommercial, the chance it will not be maintained is much higher and Lumix Engine is not an exception. The only "proof" that it will be maintained is that I already worked on this 4+ years (as you can see on github) and that I'm making a commercial game with the engine.

If someone is not prevented by something (personal preference, license issue, features) there is no reason to use Lumix Engine rather than UE/Unity. UE/Unity should be the right option for 95% of developers.

Thanks for the reply. I will have look and try to test it.

But if you think this is something ready to use in commercial projects, ask for money. I usually feel personally better to if I can pay for things, also paying for things opens a window for to have quality requirements.

It's hard to monetize projects like this, donate button is useless, maybe patreon.

I do not wish to appear overly cynical (and apologies if this does), but what is stopping me investing all my time/effort into this, and finding out the licensing terms have changed such that it becomes more on par with commercial offerings?

Seems like the only benefit would be short lived, whilst I would take on a lot of the disadvantages of not going to a more commercial offering immediately. I'm genuinely interested. I can imagine this putting a lot of people off "committing".

You/I/Anybody can not change the license retrocatively. It means that current source code is MIT and it always will be. I/Anybody might fork the engine under different license or even close source it, but that won't change the fact that current source code is still MIT licensed. Me close-sourcing it is the same as me abandoning it - you can still continue using/developing it under any license you wish.

Appreciate the answer, thanks. I guess that would rule out the people who definitely do not even want the possibility of the prospect of maintaining their own engine. I would be curious to know what kind of percentage we would be talking about...

No engine is guaranteed to be maintained, not even the UE/Unity. Look at CryEngine, once a big, popular engine. Now with all the CryTek's problems, I would not bet it won't get dumped.

Maybe you could help make sure the engine doesn't die on the vine by contributing.

Just so sick of this mentality that single-contributor projects aren't worth spending time on. This is how we get the problem of "open source" send to only happen if it's big companies like Google, Mozilla, or Facebook doing it. It's not like they haven't killed many a project just because it wasn't the gigantic, multi-million dollar success they needed it to be to justify spending their effort.

Indeed, I'm using several open source libraries in the engine and I am not afraid they would die. Because even if they did, I would just continue changing them on my own. I think it's less risky than using e.g. CryEngine, since recently there is a high chance Crytek going bankrupt and there is no way single person can handle something as big and complicated as CryEngine.

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