Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source.<p>I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way.<p>Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalent to supporting it. I&#x27;m not immune to this. I just considered how I would feel if React or Golang suddenly changed so that I had to pay to use them. React is supported by Facebook and Golang by Google, both unimaginably massive and wealthy corporations. Even though I have never directly contributed a single thing to either project, I know I would feel some combination of betrayed, angry and frustrated.<p>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don&#x27;t think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing. I don&#x27;t mean just the cost, even the logistics of that many micro-transactions. Imagine trying to pay every YouTuber you watch some fair value for the content you consume.<p>We are no where near an answer on this, I don&#x27;t believe it will be settled within my lifetime. But the current model to justify the free-lunch we&#x27;ve all been served is crumbling. If the corporations that we expect to bear the cost of our free-lunch start to crumble then we are all in for a rude awakening.