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Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: htt

Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much better than you while you waste time creating this free thing that other people free-ride off of. More on unity: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-change-makes-cloud-based-spatialos-games-illegal/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan... Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!

zozbot123 8y ago
Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will. The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  > more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model. Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-linux-distribution https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-lin... (mind you, that's 2008 data. I couldn't find more recent estimates) Mongo is quite unrepresentative here - not least, because they're selling the very same software (MongoDB) under both OSS and proprietary licensing! A better comparison in the database space would be e.g. PostgresSQL - the latest versions of which, BTW, are including "NoSQL"-focused features that make it quite competitive with the likes of MongoDB.
- vnorilo 8y ago
  I don't know if blender is comparable at all. There's a lot more to a game engine than rendering, and AFAIK blender is not even intended for real time animation. Ogre is an open source 3d engine, although I don't know about its funding: https://www.ogre3d.org/ https://www.ogre3d.org/
  - KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
    Maybe Godot engine is more comparable?
    - homarp 8y ago
      Yes, Godot is more comparable. And indeed https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083476975312949250 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108347697531294925... does mention Godot
  - awirth 8y ago
    Blender has a full game engine included in it, although it looks like it's getting cut with the next release: https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/ https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/
    - brylie 8y ago
      Blender 2.8 has removed the game engine. https://www.blender.org/2-8/ https://www.blender.org/2-8/
  - evanweaver 8y ago
    Blender started as a closed source, venture-backed startup and was purchased and released to the community by a foundation set up by one of the founders when the startup failed. So it too was subsidized by corporate interests that ultimately saw no return on their investment.
tanilama 8y ago
> megacap open source company Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort bait isn't cool. My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make money from OSS software, if that is what license at the time, permits.
- p10_user 8y ago
  > Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Presumably that's why, in the words of the parent poster, the dream is dead.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  The problem is the licenses suck. Parity and Prosper solve these problems with Parity covering your use case: https://licensezero.com/ https://licensezero.com/
  - JoshTriplett 8y ago
    Those aren't Open Source licenses, so that's the same as the suggestion in the parent comment to make the software proprietary and charge for licenses.
    - nickpsecurity 8y ago
      Parity is an open source license that should achieve the goal of contribution sharing better than the others since it's wording focuses on changes, not distribution models. https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity It also has a patent license, unlike many permissive ones. They shouldnt even qualify as open source if you can get sued under patent law for using that software. Need some patent protection in license.
      - JoshTriplett 8y ago
cat199 8y ago
> the dream of a megacap open source company is dead https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/ Market Cap 31.055B S&P 500 Component Or does this exemplify your point w/r/t RH for-fee bolt-on addons?
- cpitman 8y ago
  Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when they have a production issue, a new major vulnerability is disclosed, etc, that someone knows the technology from the ground up and also knows the details of their deployment and can get them back into a good state. Our support+engineering teams are top notch, so retaining customers year over year is relatively easy. I work in Red Hat Consulting, which is a much smaller share of overall revenue. It doesn't scale nearly as well, since you only get revenue periodically for weeks to months at a time, with a lot of overhead to sell and manage assignments.
  - aquaticsunset 8y ago
    To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall. Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company. However, you're correct. Red Hat's value prop is in top notch support.
    - SSLy 8y ago
      The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.
  - 8y ago
CydeWeys 8y ago
Is 5% supposed to be a lot? For that you get an entire game engine, which seems certain to save way more than 5% in total costs from not having to write one from scratch. Steam and the major app stores take 6X that much (30%) just for distribution! If Unreal is better than Unity, then it seems worth paying for.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  5% is absolutely a fair price, even a great price. But it's a lot compared to free of course. For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence *not worth it. Unreal is also not definitively better than Unity, which is really good. Anyway my post shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Unreal but rather telling Unity that they should be more like Unreal rather than the other way around.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    > For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence not worth it. * I guess only when developing their own engine is cheaper for them.
    - hdra 8y ago
      Developing their own engine isn't the only other option, Unity's model where you pay a flat-fee for the engine regardless of your sales is another, and if the game is selling really well, that is a much cheaper option.
      - shmerl 8y ago
        Not if Unity doesn't perform well enough for their needs I suppose.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        It doesn't appear that there are any AAA titles made using the Unity engine though. It may simply not be good enough. The Unreal engine, by contrast, has many AAA titles built on it, including quite possibly the biggest game of all time, Fortnite.
kemitchell 8y ago
> Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. In other words: Don't do open core? Dual licensing, more than any other common open source business model besides paid development, maintains the link between value of software produced and value for which customers pay. If a customer can't use the software under its public license, perhaps because the license requires release of code they want to keep closed, they pay for a license. The value of the software they become able to use, under paid license, sets the price you pay. Meanwhile, all the development work the vendor's people do goes into the product for which customers pay a price. The article seems to imply that dual licensing is all or the crux of Mongo's business model, when it's only a relatively small part of their package offering. That can be hard to see, since both under AGPL and under the new SSPL, Mongo's choice of public license doesn't prevent developers from creating closed, proprietary applications using Mongo as data store. As they seem to intend it, Mongo dual licensing covers only platform developers who offer Mongo itself as-a-service to application developers. I hear tell the company has actually spent substantial time sending letters to users clarifying that they didn't need to buy a separate license to use Mongo in their closed apps under AGPL.

zozbot123 8y ago

Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will. The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
> more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model. Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-linux-distribution https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-lin... (mind you, that's 2008 data. I couldn't find more recent estimates) Mongo is quite unrepresentative here - not least, because they're selling the very same software (MongoDB) under both OSS and proprietary licensing! A better comparison in the database space would be e.g. PostgresSQL - the latest versions of which, BTW, are including "NoSQL"-focused features that make it quite competitive with the likes of MongoDB.
vnorilo 8y ago
I don't know if blender is comparable at all. There's a lot more to a game engine than rendering, and AFAIK blender is not even intended for real time animation. Ogre is an open source 3d engine, although I don't know about its funding: https://www.ogre3d.org/ https://www.ogre3d.org/
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
  Maybe Godot engine is more comparable?
  - homarp 8y ago
    Yes, Godot is more comparable. And indeed https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083476975312949250 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/108347697531294925... does mention Godot
- awirth 8y ago
  Blender has a full game engine included in it, although it looks like it's getting cut with the next release: https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/ https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/
  - brylie 8y ago
    Blender 2.8 has removed the game engine. https://www.blender.org/2-8/ https://www.blender.org/2-8/
- evanweaver 8y ago
  Blender started as a closed source, venture-backed startup and was purchased and released to the community by a foundation set up by one of the founders when the startup failed. So it too was subsidized by corporate interests that ultimately saw no return on their investment.

tanilama 8y ago

> megacap open source company Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort bait isn't cool. My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make money from OSS software, if that is what license at the time, permits.

p10_user 8y ago
> Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Presumably that's why, in the words of the parent poster, the dream is dead.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
The problem is the licenses suck. Parity and Prosper solve these problems with Parity covering your use case: https://licensezero.com/ https://licensezero.com/
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Those aren't Open Source licenses, so that's the same as the suggestion in the parent comment to make the software proprietary and charge for licenses.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    Parity is an open source license that should achieve the goal of contribution sharing better than the others since it's wording focuses on changes, not distribution models. https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity It also has a patent license, unlike many permissive ones. They shouldnt even qualify as open source if you can get sued under patent law for using that software. Need some patent protection in license.
    - JoshTriplett 8y ago

cat199 8y ago

> the dream of a megacap open source company is dead https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/ Market Cap 31.055B S&P 500 Component Or does this exemplify your point w/r/t RH for-fee bolt-on addons?

cpitman 8y ago
Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when they have a production issue, a new major vulnerability is disclosed, etc, that someone knows the technology from the ground up and also knows the details of their deployment and can get them back into a good state. Our support+engineering teams are top notch, so retaining customers year over year is relatively easy. I work in Red Hat Consulting, which is a much smaller share of overall revenue. It doesn't scale nearly as well, since you only get revenue periodically for weeks to months at a time, with a lot of overhead to sell and manage assignments.
- aquaticsunset 8y ago
  To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall. Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company. However, you're correct. Red Hat's value prop is in top notch support.
  - SSLy 8y ago
    The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.
- 8y ago

CydeWeys 8y ago

Is 5% supposed to be a lot? For that you get an entire game engine, which seems certain to save way more than 5% in total costs from not having to write one from scratch. Steam and the major app stores take 6X that much (30%) just for distribution! If Unreal is better than Unity, then it seems worth paying for.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
5% is absolutely a fair price, even a great price. But it's a lot compared to free of course. For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence *not worth it. Unreal is also not definitively better than Unity, which is really good. Anyway my post shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Unreal but rather telling Unity that they should be more like Unreal rather than the other way around.
- shmerl 8y ago
  > For some games this is millions or hundreds of millions of dollars which is objectively a lot and hence not worth it. * I guess only when developing their own engine is cheaper for them.
  - hdra 8y ago
    Developing their own engine isn't the only other option, Unity's model where you pay a flat-fee for the engine regardless of your sales is another, and if the game is selling really well, that is a much cheaper option.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Not if Unity doesn't perform well enough for their needs I suppose.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      It doesn't appear that there are any AAA titles made using the Unity engine though. It may simply not be good enough. The Unreal engine, by contrast, has many AAA titles built on it, including quite possibly the biggest game of all time, Fortnite.

kemitchell 8y ago

> Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. In other words: Don't do open core? Dual licensing, more than any other common open source business model besides paid development, maintains the link between value of software produced and value for which customers pay. If a customer can't use the software under its public license, perhaps because the license requires release of code they want to keep closed, they pay for a license. The value of the software they become able to use, under paid license, sets the price you pay. Meanwhile, all the development work the vendor's people do goes into the product for which customers pay a price. The article seems to imply that dual licensing is all or the crux of Mongo's business model, when it's only a relatively small part of their package offering. That can be hard to see, since both under AGPL and under the new SSPL, Mongo's choice of public license doesn't prevent developers from creating closed, proprietary applications using Mongo as data store. As they seem to intend it, Mongo dual licensing covers only platform developers who offer Mongo itself as-a-service to application developers. I hear tell the company has actually spent substantial time sending letters to users clarifying that they didn't need to buy a separate license to use Mongo in their closed apps under AGPL.