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?

Godot 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 Godot 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:

  1. This game uses Godot Engine, available under the following license:
  3. Copyright (c) 2014-present Godot Engine contributors.
  4. Copyright (c) 2007-2014 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur.
  6. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
  7. of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
  8. in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
  9. to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
  10. copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
  11. furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
  13. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
  14. copies or substantial portions of the Software.
  16. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
  17. IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
  18. FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
  19. AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
  20. LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
  21. OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
  22. SOFTWARE.

Beside its own MIT license, Godot 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 Godot 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.

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.

Tip

Godot 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:

For third-party components used by the engine:

Third-party licenses

Godot itself contains software written by third parties, which is compatible with, but not covered by Godot’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 Godot project, this is fairly difficult to do thoroughly. For the Godot 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 GODOT_COPYRIGHT.txt to prevent any confusion with your own code and assets.

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