> 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.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417#note_19...

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.