Yeah I get lots of hate as soon as I bring up the topic of helping Epic for free because of a few reasons, people want ownership of their code whatever that means, people dont want to be giving Epic something for free probably because they feel like their time is worth something and maybe because they want to keep the source to themselves for a competitive advantage. All reasons I actually understand in part but there have been projects where people have come together and collaborated to make them better, Epic charge actually a rather minimal royalty fee in the scheme of what they provide.
I have said before that I would have gladly been paying the subscription all these years, one of the prime reasons behind that is to keep the people who want something for nothing all the time out, another reason is that I feel it could improve the support end with new features, engine bug/QA etc.
We could be working together instead of arguing about it thats basically where Im at, theres lots of people here with skills and talents that go to waste debating semantics instead of being productive and making the engine/frameworks better for. The UE4 catch phrase is on the money, “When you succeed, we succeed!” (or some iteration of that) as UE4 developers building the community as a whole whether its indie dev studios, hobbyists, AAA… Anyone using the engine can benefit and those benefits can trickle down to and anyone can contribute to that cause. I dont like that with everything Epic has done for the community they are lumped in with big corporations that are publicly traded on the stock market, I really dont feel Epic have evil ulterior motives, that theres something hidden in the EULA so they can steal my livelyhood or some other tinfoil hat conspiracy.