I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalent to supporting it. I'm not immune to this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.
But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing. I don't mean just the cost, even the logistics of that many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you watch some fair value for the content you consume.
We are no where near an answer on this, I don't believe it will be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify the free-lunch we've all been served is crumbling. If the corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.
I think you've completely misunderstood the situation. This isn't people feeling entitled, rather it's people feeling vulnerable to the whims of a private, self-interested entity.
While it isn't my reason, I think most people advocating for open-source, actually see it simply as a way to keep such private actors honest, and prevent them from becoming corrupted. Like many people have said, this particular situation would have been received much differently had the changes not been applied retroactively.
> I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
I don't get your logic. A proprietary company screws over customers, and that is, to you, an indication that OSS doesn't work?
Isn't it exactly the reverse? Anyway watching this saga now would be mad to continue with Unity, and would be a little wary of closed-source in general.
I don't think anything is "crumbling". Some companies got a large amounts of investment and sky high valuations on a product they were practically giving away. Now they need to figure out how to make those valutions work and return that investment. That sucks for them, but that doesn't prove that its impossible to sustain an open source business to make a certain piece of software.
I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.
Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.
>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment.
That seems contradictory to your opening sentence though, no? Eventually an open source project will get to the point that it's so good (or even good enough) that a commercial product is simply uncompetitive. That will happen with game engines to. Decisions like this will only accelerate it.
Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure we signed on with made sense. They’re literally changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee structure. Games which are no longer sold at the same nominal price and a massive existing install base who anytime they reinstall our game we get the privilege of paying Unity each time forever.
> Nah, we used and paid for Unity because the licensing structure we signed on with made sense. They’re literally changing the terms on us in a way we cannot push back against. Games made years ago are subject to this new fee structure.
and you can still do this with the software codebase released before april 3rd, you just don't get ongoing development.
this may, of course, involve rollbacks etc, you need to rebase onto the older version not the one that's been out for the last 5 months. But the license does explicitly allow you to do this.
> Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1).
> I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
I just want to point out that the biggest non-contributors to open-source are the enterprise companies you either never or barely heard about, whose entire stacks run on tons of open source and yet it's those end user enterprise shops that are making millions.
In many ways, this probably includes Unity themselves.
It helps to think of FLOSS as an ecosystem, not individual components. Also those large companies use many parts of the ecosystem and chances are some of your code, just not necessarily the component you are using (most). Even only using the ecosystem reinforces it for others and in turn the chances support existing or publish new tools in it.
More often than not, open source licenses are given for very practical reasons that aren’t directly tied to extracting money directly.
Foundational libraries, tools, frameworks etc. is often open sourced so people don’t have to “reinvent the weel” every time they switch jobs and positions. Additionally, large orgs can benefit from having a larger talent pool to draw from, because there’s more people familiar with open source software.
Do you think Oracle is maintaining Java (etc.) for altruistic reasons?
OSS is often also a vehicle for marketing, selling expertise or ops services.
Stuff is open sourced so it gets used, built upon and to gain mindshare, community and to find collaborators etc.
You using or building on the software doesn’t in any way detract from that value proposition and often adds to it in indirect ways.
>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing.
Luckily, the licenses of these projects are all such that, the minute the maintainer pulls the rug out, you are perfectly free to fork the project and move on as if nothing happened. Open source protects you.
> I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.
we definitely are, and it's the inherent contradiction of "one entity pays to maintain it, another entity makes all the money from exploiting it". this is why there's such a commotion around BSL and dual-licensing schemes.
GPL/AGPL itself is a coherent mechanism for sustaining development. BSD/MIT tends to lead to an embrace-extend-extinguish model where one company pays to write the software, and then Amazon makes it an S3 service, extends and extinguishes the original core by adding proprietary features they keep to themselves, and public development ceases or languishes.
we are lining up for a similar showdown in the CPU space with ARM vs RISC-V. When Amazon and Google say they want an open ISA, they certainly don't mean they're going to open up their stuff. They want it to be open to them, they have proprietary extensions they bolt on (to all those instruction fields left as "vendor-determined") and proprietary accelerators they interface, and they will keep all that proprietary and never sell it outside the company. And that's the return of this same "proprietary vs GPL/AGPL vs MIT" battle. The ability for large commercial entities to extract all the value from open-source work and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
ARM already very much is a "lowest-common-denominator" company, they thrive on designing architectures that are "good enough" and then the actual secret sauce goes in the way you customize it and what you bolt on alongside. And that's exactly what RISC-V will cement, because google and amazon and facebook don't compete on how fast they can make the CPU core, they compete on how cheap they can make it. Which is why vCPU units are still specified in sandybridge-equivalent-cores, and why we're getting zen4c cores instead of faster ones, etc - they don't care how fast it is, they care about selling you more units, and that means being able to provide more units.
audiovisual (and I am including video games here) is a somewhat unique space though because you will not win this battle, the effort involved in building unity or unreal from scratch is herculean, and all of the parties involved are used to exorbitant spends to make the product happen (which I suppose is also true of silicon!)
Sometimes this comes into conflict with the GPL community - like NVIDIA's inability to open their legacy driver core, or AMD's inability to get HDMI 2.1 working on their open driver core (which seems to have stalled out again, the dev who said "august or september" has gone radio-silent). Because if you ask HDMI Forum or Dolby or Fraunhofer or Motion Pictures Experts Group to license as GPL they're going to have a sensible chuckle while clicking the delete email button. That's not how this space works.
I am actually not opposed to proprietary in general, and especially in this space it almost is a necessity given the amount of work involved. Someone has to be paid to sit down and write engine code all day, and they have to be very skilled and specialized. And this applies whether it's Unreal or Unity or your own in-house engine.
Companies obviously don't like to write a check, which is why they keep doing in-house engines even though it literally keeps killing games, like the way frostbite killed ME:A and Anthem. They would rather a game tank then to pay 2% of gross to buy an off-the-shelf engine (and you best believe if you're EA negotiating a license for all your games you're not paying list price).
What unity is doing here is insane from a business perspective, but they're not wrong either that it's a situation where they're doing an equal share of the total work (there are a lot of man-hours in an engine) and get paid jack shit. Just like open-source software. And when you increase licensing fees (like ARM, or like software going BSL/AGPL) then companies start looking for the exits. Because they're used to extracting all the profit, and at a certain scale it does become viable to just do the work yourself anyway, rather than paying someone else. And that's why you get ME:A and Anthem and BF2042.
edit: And I wrote all that without knowing that unity is currently losing a billion dollars a year, so... yeah.
I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.
Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalent to supporting it. I'm not immune to this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.
But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing. I don't mean just the cost, even the logistics of that many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you watch some fair value for the content you consume.
We are no where near an answer on this, I don't believe it will be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify the free-lunch we've all been served is crumbling. If the corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.