Unity's Plan Won't Work, but Someone Else's Will
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5196308

It’s scary that the Unity debacle is not just happening in games but a very real threat not just in digital and app space but in real life.

It can happen in medicine, housing, even the food we eat if the trend of subscriptions and lock ins continue.

Despite this, a global concerted effort towards Open Source tech is still not happening.

In Unity for example, there is a push to transition to Unreal but less so for Godot. We see this happening with reddit too. And soon maybe we’ll see it in real life. What’s stopping our hotels and landlords from charging us everytime we open doors.

We see this in the rampant mandatory tips. Where everyone is automatically charged per order.

It’s scary and frustrating at the same time that there may not be a clear remedy for this. As the world shifts to subscriptions and services, do we truly own anything anymore?

    • drspod@lemmy.mlEnglish
      30·
      1 year ago

      An open source project backed by a corporation that sells support. And… the open source community almost instantly turns on that and decides they are evil

      Redhat was the golden child of the open source community, the paragon of open source success stories, until fairly recently.

      Canonical was also very highly respected until they started putting Amazon ads into people’s menus.

      It is not something that happens instantly for no reason, it’s because of the need for these companies to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of a product to appease shareholders. Open source companies can, and do, thrive without screwing their communities over. The problem is the mindset that creating value for shareholders is the only thing that matters.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
        1·
        1 year ago

        It’s because of the need for these companies to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of a product to appease shareholders.

        Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. ( on Wikipedia ) established shareholder primacy meaning publicly-owned companies must favor the interests of shareholder dividends over interests of the workers, the customers or the economy.

        It means a commercial interest that is publicly owned (on the stock market) cannot keep a fair agreement with other interests if it can enshittify to raise profits, nor can it work towards long-term development of the company.

        This also kills the notion of supply-side (trickle-down) economic policy, since anything that trickles is profits failing to go to shareholder dividends.

        Shareholder primacy means a company has to be as ruthless as possible in order to maximize profits, which makes benign capitalism impossible.

        It also means developers would do well to create a robust open-source, freeware, public-domain or copyleft game engine. I don’t know how close Godot is to this.

    • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      A universal basic income would allow more developers to choose to work on software they actually like, rather than the demands of business and their proprietary models.

    • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      What can happen, and actually happen in a lot of software fields, is multiple companies investing in the tool. That’s the case for the Linux kernel, for databases, for programming languages…

      Many game companies even have their own in-house engine. Instead of investing in that (usually sub-par) engine, they could be investing in an open Source engine.

      I don’t understand why this doesn’t happen in games. And don’t tell me that they want to keep their own engine as a competitive advantage, because most in-house engines are shit.