Terraria devs condemn Unity, pledge $100k each to rival open-source engines and $1k a month going forward.

☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 419 points –
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The dynamics of open source development are very different from commercial ventures. For example, Mastodon is basically developed by a single person with a few contributors. Yet, from user perspective it's superior to Twitter in many ways which is a company that used to have around 3k employees. The fact that Unity is a big company that has a lot of money doesn't directly translate into doing much higher quality development over Godot. It's a more polished product right now, but even a few hundred thousand can make a huge difference for Godot because that would mean full time development for at least a year.

Bucky was right once again with his theory of "Ephemeralization" https://dbpedia.org/page/Ephemeralization ... The only reason we're concerned with these companies employing Devs and spending Billions to do what small teams of FOSS are able to achieve is simply a bad economic system that requires "make work" or Bullshit jobs for wages to feed the parasite class, instead of us living like the Jetson's. Time to move one!

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7500 employees

But yes, to your point, I have a somewhat controversial theory that given enough time, relatively niche proprietary software like Unity will not be able to compete with open-source software (if the latter is well-managed). Look at the growth that Blender has had over the last few years and what effect that has had in the 3D creation market. It seems that the game engine market is going to follow similar footsteps if Godot doesn't fall into some major pitfall.

I completely agree, once an open source project reaches a certain point of polish there's very little incentive for people to favor proprietary options over it. Blender is one of the best examples of this. Krita is another project that's increasingly displacing commercial options. I definitely think Godot has this potential as well.

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