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> Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon: > > "I grant to
by jabl 5y ago
> Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon:
> > "I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development."
That seems ... sucky, but what does that have to do with O3DE? AFAICT, the Apache 2.0 license doesn't force such employment contracts upon users.
> From the same Amazon Game Studios that has failed to release several titles with YEARS of development in them including: Breakaway, Crucible, Lord of the Rings MMO, Intensity, Nova, etc.
Are these failures due to using a particular game engine?
> The same Amazon Game Studios whose "New World" MMO had health and gold client-side, allowed inserting arbitrary HTML+JS code into the game chat that would run on other's computers, could kick players from the game, etc.
Are these failures due to the game engine?
I get it, you hate Amazon. Fine. So what?
> I don't doubt that this is open source by definition. I don't doubt that the Linux Foundation has allowed this project to live under its umbrella. But the way this came about is a far cry from being in the spirit of open source in my opinion, and rebranding it as "Open 3D" seems just a brilliant marketing trick.
> In the best case scenario, Amazon's intentions are to convince the FOSS community to develop their engine to subsidize costs long-term while maintaining ownership of the project broadly, and having full control/ownership of the new "Open3D Foundation" that they can use readily for marketing[0] similar how they do to the Rust foundation[1] to hire talent.
My guess is that they figured it doesn't make economic sense to develop and maintain their own engine vs using an off the shelf existing one like Unreal or Unity. So instead of just writing it off they open sourced it. In the best case it'll become a successful open source project like the Linux kernel or Blender, where the industry as a whole can save money by collaborating on a common open source engine. In the worst case it'll be a 'throw it over the wall' open source dump that will never acquire a development community and will thus eventually fade away. Time will tell.
- slimsag 5y agoThe employment contract point I made calls into question whether or not Amazon understands indie gamedevs, and by extension whether O3DE (as both software and a community) is developed for indie gamedevs. The game failures I highlighted call into question whether or not Amazon Game Studios produces high quality software, and by extension whether or not O3DE is likely to be high quality. Just look at the contributors to O3DE and search for "AMZN", nearly every contributor is an Amazon employee[0]. Your argument seems to be that as long as the code is open source, the rest doesn't matter. It does. My intent isn't to shit on people's work, but rather to call out that to me this feels far from some "open" initiative like Blender, GIMP, the Linux Kernel, etc. It feels more like how Android is "open source". [0] https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors
- Mikeb85 5y agoSome OSS advocates get too caught up in "community" and feelings. At the end of the day OSS is only about the licence. It's just about code ownership. Everything else is noise. As long as it's an OSS license it's good to go. Also, Blender used to be a commercial, closed source project (a very long time ago). Look how it's grown.
- slimsag 5y agoAs long as the code does what you want, you don't hope to receive any advice on how to do things, you expect no help in debugging the issues you encounter, and you don't expect to collaborate with others building on top of the same platform - then yep, community and momentum doesn't matter.
- Mikeb85 5y agoThose are all independent of license considerations. For example, Unreal engine ticks all those boxes. But it's not OSS.
- flohofwoe 5y ago> Are these failures due to the game engine? That's usually hard to say because IME the engine is always blamed first in a dysfunctional team :) But from my experience with Lumberyard (around 2016), it's definitely one of the messier legacy codebases I've seen. But I don't know how much code from this era actually still exists (the team at Amazon was just in the middle of a big rewrite to implement a traditional Unity-style workflow/object model and and break systems out into optional modules). (also I can't shake the feeling that's it's actually Denis Dyack pulling the strings in that whole O3DE endeavour - at least he seems to be the public face of the project, which doesn't inspire much confidence that this will be an actually community-governed project).
- onion2k 5y agoAre these failures due to the game engine? In the case of users being able to insert HTML+JS in to the in-game chat to kick other players, yes. The game engine should be authenticating the source of API calls.
- gmueckl 5y agoIn that case it's more a question of why that heck a chat UI inside a game cares about HTML and JS in the first place. Someone clearly overdesigned something here.
- flohofwoe 5y agoThere was probably a "chat needs to support emojis" in the requirements list and things escalated from there until the "easiest" solution was a webview widget.