Complying with licenses

What are licenses?

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

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 Godot Engine, available under the following license:

Copyright (c) 2007-2021 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur. Copyright (c) 2014-2021 Godot Engine contributors.

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.

Note

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

Inclusion

The license does not specify how it has to be included, so anything is valid as long as it can be displayed under some condition. These are the most common approaches (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.

Output log

Just printing the licensing 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 and UWP).

Accompanying file

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

Printed manual

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

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

Third-party licenses

Godot itself contains software written by third parties. Most of it does not require license inclusion, but some do. Make sure to do it if these are compiled in your Godot export template. If you’re using the official export templates, all libraries are enabled. This means you need to provide attribution for all the libraries listed below.

Here’s a list of libraries requiring attribution:

FreeType

Godot uses FreeType to render fonts. Its license requires attribution, so the following text must be included together with the Godot license:

Portions of this software are copyright © <year> The FreeType Project (www.freetype.org). All rights reserved.

Note that <year> should correspond to the value from the FreeType version used in your build. This information can be found in the editor by opening the Help > About dialog and going to the Third-party Licenses tab.

ENet

Godot includes the ENet library to handle high-level multiplayer. ENet has similar licensing terms as Godot:

Copyright (c) 2002-2020 Lee Salzman

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.

MBedTLS

If the project is done with Godot 3.1 or above and it utilizes SSL (usually through HTTP requests), the MBedTLS Apache license needs to be complied by including the following text:

Copyright The Mbed TLS Contributors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Keep in mind that Godot 2.x and 3.0 use OpenSSL instead.