Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forking is not limited to open source software
But free distribution of the fork is
Moving the goal posts
Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
381–390 of 733 posts
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#382I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal. For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation…
That reminds me. How is blender able to stay free. How is their approach different?
Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't matter. The fork will just not be an open source fork.
It does matter, since the license of the fork you can make has a huge effect on the long-term sustainability of that fork. If Unreal screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project. If Godot screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project, cooperate with others on the features they need which also help you, and start a community for E…
If Unreal screws you, you don't lose access to the engine. You are still free to work on your own fork with others.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game…
Thanks for the insight.
So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#385The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…
I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible. It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epi…
Unity didn't always want to be an advertising company. Epic didn't always want to be a store and virtual product platform.
Ambitions change. And you're subject to the whims of the ambitions of those with more power.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#386This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…
But history has shown them get cheaper and more capable over time for nearly every example you gave.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#387This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…
While it's true that this can happen to external tools, it doesn't happen very often. Companies have a very strong incentive to ensure their products are supported long terms and work well. For in-house developed software it happens frequently that past employees leave the codebase in a state, where new team members end up rewriting it.
So it's a bit weird to say you shouldn't use closed source since there is a small chance things change in a way we don't like, and then your alternative is to use in-house software, where maintenance issues in the future are pretty much guaranteed.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that is what the Unreal Engine license allows you to do https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal > 2. How You Can Use the Licensed Technology > Epic grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology in accordance with the terms of this Agreement (the “License”). This means that as long as you are not v…
Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that. The additional sections that allow distribution are the important bits and I guess the devil is in the details.
> Well, you can always modify source code and use it privately - you hardly need a license for that.
You do need a license to modify the source, use it internally, and then sell a binary you've produced with the modified source.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco se…
A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has di…
It is amazing how easy some people make falling upwards look.
Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
#390This should also be a wakeup call to anyone using closed source tools at all: DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc. While some of these tools are best in class, it's borrowed time until the owner decides to change the terms, stop offering it, or raise prices enough to damage your business. Closed source software tools are a liability, and the benefits often ar…
> DynamoDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Lambda, Azure, AWS, Azure Devops, SqlServer, Oracle, etc.
At least with these individual tools, it's usually not your entire codebase written around that thing. For instance, you can generally switch from one database to another if they decide to overcharge you. You can even switch from one cloud service to another. In other words, they (usually) don't have you nearly as locked in.
With Unity, it is a much bigger ordeal to switch to something like Godot and Unreal and most people who have already finished their games can't even really consider it as an option. This is why it was so egregious.