What's your take on this?
Erin Roberts said in June 2014: "We did an outright buyout of the engine last year and have the source code, so while we hope all the noise about Crytek blows over, as they are great partners and friends to the project, if the worse happened we would be ok, as we’ve already branched the engine and have a large team that is adding features and supporting it every day here at CIG. So even in the worst case scenario we should be fine, but obviously we hope it does not come to that."
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/2895381/#Comment_2895381
They bought a source code licence. That's standard practice and applies when companies partner up with all kinds of vendors where the product is offering something that essentially provides a high amount of risk should the product fail (CMS, Web platforms, API, engines etc.)
Quite often there will be a standard set of licences that may include compiled core libraries. If the vendor goes out of business (very common) the clients using their platform for essential business are suddenly unable to upgrade essential parts of their platform. This makes it impossible to deal with larger organisations. The solution is to offer the complete source code under licence, this way if the vendor goes down the customer can continue to fork the original product as their own.
In the meantime, while the vendor is still active they are still under all of the terms & conditions agreed with the vendor. If it's a perpetual licence you still have to pay for it annually or whatever. If the agreement involved displaying the vendors product logo that still needs to be continued. Buying a source code licence doesn't mean you own the IP. You can't just fork it and sell it as your own super new engine just because you own a source licence.
I've worked on some pretty big web platforms using CMS products and the clients will typically buy the full source code licence.