An open letter to our community

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I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what open source software and GPL-3 mean, and he approved the deal, and I gave him credit and positive feedback and sincerely thanked him. And we earned EA a lot of good publicity during a time when they were considered one of the worst companies in the world.

EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative:

https://ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2007/...

OLCP EA Contract:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf

And I've given him credit for doing that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251414

When Unity joined the Blender development fund as a Patron member while Riccitiello was CEO of Unity, I also gave him positive feedback and sincerely thanked him again, telling him how important Blender is to Unity game developers, and how important it is for them to work well together.

Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member:

https://www.blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-develo...

I recommended he watch Ton Roosendaal's excellent "Money doesn't interest me" interview, in which he does not hold back on his feelings about Autodesk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg

And also this video of Ton getting hit by a ceiling tile during a talk. (Presumably perpetrated by Autodesk!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk

Then when Joe Biden endorsed Unity three times in his inaugural address, I asked Riccitiello how much Unity paid for that product placement, but he wouldn't tell me:

>"With Unity we can do great things, important things!"

>"For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury."

>"And Unity is the path forward."

>-Joe Biden's inaugural address.

Then after Unity recently announced they're pulling the rug out from under their developers, I posted to Riccitiello's Facebook page a screen snapshot of the github star ranking table showing that Godot suddenly had a 535.6% increase in stars, and sincerely thanked him again, writing "Thank you for your substantial contribution to open source gaming engines, at the expense of your own company!"

So I'm pretty sure he's aware of open source software, but I don't think he actually meant to benefit the Godot project so much at the expense of Unity.

The Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, immediately condemned the death threat that somebody (who turned out to be a Unity employee) posted, which caused Unity to cancel an event and close their office.

https://twitter.com/godotengine/status/1702413121086705951

>Godot Engine @godotengine

>We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community.

The truth behind the Unity "Death Threats":

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16j21jg/the_truth_...

>Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.

Reddit thread from 8 years ago, with recent posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/3cxogb/til_unity_c...

TIL Unity CEO John Riccitiello was former CEO of EA. He saved EA from declining profits by sellings games EA made online (Origin) rather than physical packages and raising game quality. Also, he's barely known for being CEO at Unity Technologies.

>drakfyre 8 yr. ago

>I am honestly really pleased the hate has died down. Riccitiello is a pretty damn good CEO and Unity's former CEO (though a SUPER COOL dude) really didn't have the practice nor want to be a CEO of such a rapidly expanding company.

>rvc3m8 8 days ago

>now, that didn't age well, did it? ;)

>drakfyre 7 days ago

>No, no it did not, not at all...

I think it does, to an extent. Reddit is still alive, for example. It's just nowhere near the community and content it used to be and, in my mind, it won't ever be that way again. Reddit's biggest benefit was that most of the moderators were people who were really, really into very niche topics. The big subs were all moderated by the same 10 people so they devolved into meme depositories and made up stories that stoked emotions. Now that the principled mods have left and those niche subreddits are being taken over by people who care more about the memes than the topic at hand, it's falling apart.

This is a great take because I suspect that the airline industry is exactly the reason why all these companies are now in the "death by a thousand cuts" stage of their strategies. Literally no one prefers the airlines today and the experience of flying to the same degree (and especially not more) than they did a decade ago or more. Everything about the experience, from the boarding to the seating to the food, is objectively worse than it was before and yet people still need to fly.