Open Source In The Industry

The primary motivator behind decisions of firms, especially publicly traded ones, is profits. Other considerations such as the philosophical viewpoints on the nature of software or providing goods and services that benefit all can only be considered if there are enough profits to satisfy shareholders in the first place.

Thus the industry will accept open source so far as it aligns with their profit making goals. This is why the nature of the technology matters a lot too. If it’s used by many businesses, it’ll get a lot of indusrty support and funding behind it, if not it’ll have a hard time getting financing.

I’ve observed that the most industry supported open source software tend to be the tools, not the final product. In the game industry, for example, there are a lot of momentum behind open source game engines, but there aren’t many successful open source games. This is because as a gaming studio, especially if you don’t have the resources to either license or develop an engine, having an open source engine is wonderful. Since there are enough studios who wants to make games, and a well designed engine is able to support many different kind of studios, it makes sense that engines get a lot of industry support by those who benefit from it’s existence.

On the other hand, it’d be very hard to sustain a large open source game financially. Because in that case, you’re target audience is not other business who’d benefit from the software you’re making, it’s people who want to play your games. They don’t require the constant maintenance and improvements a business might need, hence less likely to support financially.

Overall, I think individual users are much more inclined to simply use the software for free and not think about it, as opposed to businesses who not only need your software but also they need it to be well supported and maintained.

Group Progress

Our progress has been a little slow for the past week but we’re picking up speed. So far we have documentation contributions mostly as well as a contribution for a benchmark. We’re looking at plugins and demo projects to contribute to. So far godot-vim plugins seems like a good plugin that has a lot of potential for contributing, however, the community is not very active. This is surprising considering the demand for vim keybindings in Godot’s built in text editor.