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?
Ticketmaster is another real world example we’ve got right now. Or any service that adds on arbitrary fees that aren’t a part of the advertised price.
Ticketmaster is a monopoly that should have never been allowed.
Unreal is creaming their pants this week. They can’t have imagined a better sales pitch.
We chose unity because we thought unreal model was shitty too.
Next time it’s open source, godot or stride or i don’t know, but not unreal.
They would have done the same shit if it worked
they just have to unveil some new shiny tools to convert from unity to unreal and unity is kill
There will never be a tool to convert Unity projects to Unreal. However there are already several to convert Unity to Godot, because both use C#
Edit: And as a dev that has used both, I just converted my project to Godot.
Edit again: It actually may be possible or at least be made easier using LLMs to convert to Unreal
How much work was it to convert ?
I guess the tool didn’t managed every single detail ?
Sadly it can’t work that way. From a programming perspective alone they are very different engines.
Unity uses C# while Unreal is C++.
I am a strong supporter of open source tech. Specifically the proper FOSS flavor.
It is NEVER going to be a valid alternative when there is a massive multi-million (if not billion) dollar alternative with an affordable license. Because it takes time to develop these feature sets and time is money. Even someone working in their spare time can’t put in a full day of work… and are likely burned out FROM a full day of work.
And that ignores the tendency for GPL-like licenses that are straight up cancer as far as companies and products are concerned. I respect the ideology but… that is WHY companies are less likely to pull a Valve and dump massive amounts of money into supporting open source projects. Like, every time someone pushes a cool piece of software with a GPL-like license I just think “Cool, you are actively making sure your feature set never improves anything”
The best we can hope for is the model used by Ubuntu and the like. 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 and starts going out of their way to shit on it at every step of the way.
As for the overall idea of “do we even own anything in this world of subscriptions?”. That, much like with the “I bought the disc so I own this game” mindset is very much a fallacy. Because you can get a life time license to version 1.2315151651616 of FooSoft. hell, you can even get 1.x of FooSoft. That… doesn’t matter because the moment a CVE is found in FooSoft or its dependencies you need a new version. Which is WHY we tend toward these subscription models because we know we need the updated version.
Like, as a good example: Basically ANY new hardware or software suite needs support for Red Hat, and to a lesser extent Ubuntu, if they are planning on selling their products. Because any company worth its salt is picking a distro with a support model. Which basically means RHEL and whatever the paid Ubuntu is. Because even ignoring any tech support aspects, a support contract is a guaranteed timeline for fixing vulnerabilities.
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.
Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for…) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for “free” but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is “good” because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.
But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be “challenged”. I’ve worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.
But when you are more or less the sole “ninja” developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you “stagnate”.
And most people who live and breathe “awesome code” are doing so because it lets them do fun stuff on the weekend. Which, until we live in a post scarcity society, needs money/resources.
Hell, if I haven’t already pissed off more than enough people with this, I’ll add on that I have never met what I would consider a “good” software engineer who doesn’t “work for the weekend” as it were. Because if all you want to do with your entire life is code? You never stop iterating. You always want to make the code better and I need to regularly “check in” with you to make you push code to a repository or remove the WIP from your MR. Whereas the people who want to finish their job so they can go climbing or take a trip to the beach with their family or just blow money on hookers and blow? They are able to realize when something is “good enough for production” and they get a LOT more done.
The right-to-repair movement is showing us cyber-feudalism will fail in time, as is the failing BMW subscription seats thing. We may be moving into a golden age of service and media piracy in which households throughout the developed world simply resort on cracked services. We may be using cracked ink cartridges and illegally-jailbroken refrigerators until they realize the compound public resentment and ingoing war against pirates is cutting more into profits than is gained from rent seeking DRM
We’ve already seen how the efforts by the record lables to litigate against children and elderly can go poorly and just increase piracy (or worse, decrease engagement).
But it means we’ll have to suffer more as the paradigm shifts. Capitalists are not allowed to relent when it comes to profit seeking, making them the enemy of the people. And a government that favors commercial corporations over the public (as is the case in the US) is also, by definition, the enemy of the people. It means any transaction is predatory unless there is a force acting in the interest of the worker and the consumer that effectively dissuades contracts without parity.
I would use open source but there are no open source game engines that support VR with controller and hand interactions, let alone online avatars. Open Source is just behind in a major way in the VR/AR space and I hope it makes closing that gap a priority.
There are strong indications that Valve’s Deckard is imminent. Whether that is a standalone VR device or a “console” like steam machine with a heavy emphasis on VR is up for debate.
But it should result in a much stronger focus on non-proprietary VR libraries that are OS agnostic. I doubt it will make for a massive market share increase, but it will hopefully make working with ti more palatable for the various free engines. Because NOBODY wants to spend their free time interfacing with facebook. But OpenXR (or something actually good?)? We’ll see.
I remember when FB bought Oculus and everyone was outraged swearing to boycott and maybe they did, but the Quest went on to be the best selling VR headset by a lot.
Techno -feudalism
Strangely enough, don’t feel like laughing.
what’s funny tho? dude has a point
The absolute absurdity of framing and drawing comparisons between the technology sector and feudalism.
Well that’s why he called it “techno-feudalism” because he does recognise it’s anachronistic
Have you watched the video? The point stands tho. Argument goes as follows: “just like in feudal times you were forced to pay a rent for the privilege of living on the land of your lord, likewise nowadays companies seek to establish a rent seeking position, like leeches, where you pay for the sole privilege of using their product. It’s different from ‘a price’ because customers often have no other choice.”
Oh I guess there aren’t open source alternatives.
Just sounds like an interesting name for SAAS.
SaaS, literally slavery.
Requesting source of the emoji.
Google GBoard built in!
