Unity exec tells Ars he’s on a mission to earn back developer trust

Interview: "It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way."

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I'm struggling to think of a single complex, high level, end-user application or suite where the Open Source version has replaced a professional one. OpenOffice is probably the closest, and it has negligible user share.

WebKit has done a pretty good job of exterminating closed-source competitors. I struggle to come up with a second example, though.

 

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Could be, but that sort of thing carries extreme penalties, and Unity is sort of a niche thing compared to most of the tech market. I'm more inclined to suspect incompetence, or--more charitably--lack of any sort of familiarity or context with what Unity even does.

Well, stock analysts rarely issue sell recommendations, period. Stock analyst reports are worthwhile for the actual facts and data they contain, as they generally do good jobs of organizing information in easily accessible format—including some that aren’t otherwise easily accessible to the world at large—but the ratings they issue shouldn’t be treated as serious advice.

 

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This argument is so tired. FOSS is all around us, and getting stronger while commercial software (like Unity) gets crappier (in one way or another).

True, Linux hasn't made much dent in the desktop market. And yet, my household currently has 2 Windows PCs, 1 Linux PC... and at least 10 Linux-based smart devices. Linux is creeping in everywhere, because its openness makes it fundamentally better to work with than commercial platforms.

Many other FOSS products already hold at least enough market share to put pressure on their commercial equivalents to be less evil. I rely on Inkscape where I once used CorelDraw and Illustrator. And I use GIMP extensively as well. It's already ahead of Photoshop in some ways (apart from price) and evolving steadily. Soon it will leave Photoshop behind in the dust - and/or force Adobe to give graphics professionals a better deal.

I also use endless FOSS utilities for digital 'odd jobs' - KeePass is a good example. I use these products not (primarily) because of my belief in the principles of FOSS, but because open standards are practically the only worthwhile guarantee that a product won't abruptly turn against me - as Creative Suite Cloud has done, and as Unity is currently trying to do (to developers).

Um, right. The only way GIMP will Photoshop behind in the dust soon is if you redefine the word "soon" to be the one Elon Musk was using when he described the time schedule for Tesla's FSD. Back when Adobe launched the subscription model, photographers and graphics designers cried bloody murder...and dejectedly went back to using Photoshop, because it was the only viable solution out there. Life hasn't changed today. GIMP doesn't even register for most non-Linux users. Don't believe me, go look at DPReview's forums. Searching for "photoshop" returns 180K results while "gimp" returns 9800 results, and the first two threads to hit are from people saying they found GIMP too hard.