Hello!
This engine seems fantastic, and has so much potential. The work put into it is phenomenal, just by the looks of it. The fact of the matter is, there is a great lack of good open-source game engines, especially concerning wide expanses of terrain, much less whole planets. Personally, I believe this engine should be open source.
By making the engine open source, it will gain the potential to survive for a very long time, if not forever. Both open source and closed source software have the potential to fail, but open source software has the potential to survive much longer and even improve over time. The fact that it's free will be a great advantage... For instance, consider the current economical times: Games could fail just because people can't afford them so much, or a rush to release a game (rush for money) causes a poor-quality product to be released. Entire game engines and games could be overlooked just because of some fluke or another.
Consider the Quake Game Engine that's open-source. It still survives to this day, and is constantly improved. Bugs are fixed rather quickly and moreover bugs are found much quicker and more thoroughly, producing a very stable engine (and constantly becoming more so). It has so much potential, yet it still lacks the ability to render large landscapes smoothly, and it has some limitations. Nevertheless, many games have been made using the engine, most of which are still around and popular (especially since they're free and have reasonable to good graphics).
There is also the bad example of the Torque Game Engine, that is available on multiple platforms as well, but is closed source. The wonderful thing about it is that in Tribes 2, one of the main games that uses the engine, virtually unlimited landscape could be produced by smoothly integrating mirror images of the ground texture in all directions, allowing to pretty much see and go in every direction almost endlessly. The graphics were great for their time.
The game was also easily modifiable and numerous incredible mods were made, that reached toward the limits of the imagination, from teleportation, to mechas, to having the ability to construct anything you can think of in-game from pieces (lego-like... which in itself has unlimited potential, if only on a small scale usually and with plastic pieces), to so much more. Unfortunately, the Torque Game Engine is very buggy, and very poorly documented.
To fix this, large patches for the game were released from time to time. One large final patch wiped out compatibility for most of the mods, and virtually ruined much of the game. The engine in general also has a limited number of objects that can be shown at any one time (I believe somewhere around 1000). However, the game survived, and still survives. It has recently been taken up by the Tribes community, as the original master server online was shut down.
The game was revived as TribesNext, but it is still quite buggy and it's not helping the process to keep things working properly. In any case, the Engine and game had so much potential, but it was lacking and it couldn't be fixed, mainly because it was closed-source.
I believe this game engine, were it to be released open-source, could accomplish so very much... much more than all the games and game engines I mentioned combined. At the very least, if it is decided to make it closed source, in the end, when all the games that use it become "obsolete", it should still be released open-source. Just consider the fact that ROMs of ancient console game systems like Atari, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo are cycling (albeit illegally) quite a lot... they are still popular in an age where 3-dimensional photo-realism is becoming better and better.
