Attention: Here be dragons (unstable version)

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Redot.

Checking the stable version of the documentation...

Complying with licenses

Warning

The recommendations in this page are not legal advice. They are provided in good faith to help users navigate license attribution requirements.

What are licenses?

Redot is created and distributed under the MIT License. It doesn't have a sole owner, as every contributor that submits code to the project does it under this same license and keeps ownership of their contribution.

The license is the legal requirement for you (or your company) to use and distribute the software (and derivative projects, including games made with it). Your game or project can have a different license, but it still needs to comply with the original one.

Note

This section covers compliance with licenses from a user perspective. If you are interested in licence compliance as a contributor, you can find guidelines here.

Tip

Alongside the Redot license text, remember to also list third-party notices for assets you're using, such as textures, models, sounds, music and fonts. This includes free assets, which often come with licenses that require attribution.

Requirements

In the case of the MIT license, the only requirement is to include the license text somewhere in your game or derivative project.

This text reads as follows:

This game uses Redot Engine, available under the following license:

Copyright (c) 2014-present the Redot community, modified from an original work by Godot Engine contributors.
Copyright (c) 2007-2014 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Beside its own MIT license, Redot includes code from a number of third-party libraries. See Third-party licenses for details.

Note

Your games do not need to be under the same license. You are free to release your Redot projects under any license and to create commercial games with the engine.

Inclusion

The license text must be made available to the user. The license doesn't specify how the text has to be included, but here are the most common approaches (you only need to implement one of them, not all).

Credits screen

Include the above license text somewhere in the credits screen. It can be at the bottom after showing the rest of the credits. Most large studios use this approach with open source licenses.

Licenses screen

Some games have a special menu (often in the settings) to display licenses. This menu is typically accessed with a button called Third-party Licenses or Open Source Licenses.

Output log

Printing the license text using the print() function may be enough on platforms where a global output log is readable. This is the case on desktop platforms, Android and HTML5 (but not iOS).

Accompanying file

If the game is distributed on desktop platforms, a file containing the license text can be added to the software that is installed to the user PC.

Printed manual

If the game includes a printed manual, the license text can be included there.

Link to the license

The Redot Engine developers consider that a link to redotengine.org/license in your game documentation or credits would be an acceptable way to satisfy the license terms.

Tip

Redot provides several methods to get license information in the Engine singleton. This allows you to source the license information directly from the engine binary, which prevents the information from becoming outdated if you update engine versions.

For the engine itself:

Engine.get_license_text

For third-party components used by the engine:

Third-party licenses

Redot itself contains software written by third parties, which is compatible with, but not covered by Redot's MIT license.

Many of these dependencies are distributed under permissive open source licenses which require attribution by explicitly citing their copyright statement and license text in the final product's documentation.

Given the scope of the Redot project, this is fairly difficult to do thoroughly. For the Redot editor, the full documentation of third-party copyrights and licenses is provided in the COPYRIGHT.txt file.

A good option for end users to document third-party licenses is to include this file in your project's distribution, which you can e.g. rename to REDOT_COPYRIGHT.txt to prevent any confusion with your own code and assets.