The environmental impact won't prevent their use unless something like a carbon tax is present, where environmental impact directly results in cost. People "need" to travel, in a convenient way, regardless. Same with ICE cars. They'll go away when they're superseded by both cost and convenience. The environment doesn't really matter to the mass population that travels.
I've had an EV (Tesla model 3) for almost 3 years now. I'm kind of flabbergasted at how good it is. I don't think you could pay me to go back to an ICE. Or you'd have to pay me a lot!
I think more and more people are having this experience. It's just not cheap enough yet, and hasn't penetrated the used market far enough yet. But I think it's just a matter of time.
I assumed it was a combination of a relic of the plans to have unified Phone/Desktop back in Win8 days and part of a goal of eventually locking things down as much as Apple has.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more random apps on Windows than macOS, so that was never going to be a good sell...
Use habits in Dec diverge from the rest of the year because of the holidays. People are gifted new systems that come with windows 11 pre installed, and people who don't usually have time to game come online. I would not take this to mean that anything has stopped using Linux and is using windows 11 instead.
Phoronix has a good take on it [0]. Michael reports the same tiny slip but also points out that Linux was at 2.29% at the end of 2024 and sub 2% at the end of 2023. Those are pretty decent increases considering the size of the installed base. Hopefully the new Valve hardware coming out soon gives Linux another good bump by the end of 2026.
In practice, the whole system is set up in a way that discourages asking questions. Waste of time. It's truly the opposite of the transparent ideal market.
I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.
Unity is Unreal Engine's biggest competitor by far. Godot competes with Unity (mostly for 2D games) but is at least a decade off being any threat to Unreal.
So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business.
Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too.
It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more.
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
It's all hypothetical for a transaction 5 years in the past. The future you propose is one where Epic is not actually the same: they have more liquid capital towards the mission their stakeholders decide, and less influence on Godot.
However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.
Ostensibly what u/skibidithink replied. We should have a healthy distrust of international corporations giving for unapparent reasons beyond being in the same sector. We can gesture about how a gift has no obligations, but no one gets into business to not make money, and true charity is without obligation.
ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.
Epic - like every other company in the world right now, particularly tech companies - was built on open-source software. Just because they may or may not have used those specific tools does not mean their desire to give back to that community is evil.
I'm really still just trying to see the whole "Epic is donating money to take over the world!" argument here. What obligation do they get from these donations, exactly?
Sure, and maybe he does. I think there's a difference between Epic doing it as a company, for which they would likely expect to extract some value from the contribution, and Sweeney doing it as an individual.
Stardew seems to make choices consistent with the gaming community's interest, such as continued free updates and DLC along with reasonable pricing, messaging, and scope.
Epic values exclusive titles, walled gardens, poor support, and a scumbag CEO who will stomp over every market he can to get his next 8 Billion.
They ruined Rocket League, a game I purchased on steam while supporting Psyonix, which is now unusable until I agree to give them my PID and create an account. It's so egregious you can't even play bots offline. Every goal will move focus to a popped up browser window requesting account creation.
Everyone can decide where to draw the line on personal support, but to act like Epic is just being given shade because it's a corporation (as the comments below implied), is inaccurate.
Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.
Valve contributes effort to Wine via Proton, and provides open source software like Steam Audio.
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
Many corporations are free-riding on the Open Source they use. As most of us are honestly.
But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.
Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
They use a lot of open source libraries, yes, but I think it's about how much of the end product depends on the OSS tool/library. Studios using unreal engine probably don't use that much critical OSS directly – their licensed software probably does. And the software vendors / big studios do donate to tools they depend on, for instance Epic Games donated $1.2m to Blender
AAA usually goes with AAA-tools and frameworks. So Unity, Unreal Engine or even their own engine. OSS might be used, but for smaller parts or as tools for producing their stuff (like browser, editor, etc.). So while they sometimes donate, there is not much reason to give a big sum to a single project. They might be even donating more overall, but separated on multiple different projects.
Its hard in a corporate structure to just 'donate.' The culture and system is not designed for it very well. This is why selling books or support works out better for foss projects.
Its hard to see SDV as some niche 'indie' project and more and more pedantic definitions of 'indie' aren't helpful. This is a game with an estimated half BILLION in sales. He's extremely wealthy and could have given 50x more easily. Its a bit arbitrary on who or who hasnt done enough. Why no metrics like 10% of your income if you use the tool? "Volunteerism" doesn't work and stuff like this seems like mostly PR and a tip, moreso that "let me help you run this project." I mean does this make monogame better? It seems like a tool that's not really used by any commercial devs. This just seems like a "thank you for helping me get super rich," kind of thing. A tip, which is different than funding a project, fundamentally. You can tip a dying business that is destined to fold shortly, for example. That's not the same as funding it.
This sort of "we are and aren't a business" gray-zone these foss projects live in needs reform, imho. Expecting the kindness of strangers doesn't work. Look at how many foss projects get little to no donations. I don't have the fix here but these developers should probably roll up a LLC and market some kind of service these companies can just easily write invoices for instead of just expecting a random middle-manager to fight the execs to write a $100k check to some guy named Phil in Minnesota that maintains something-something-lib, which is one tiny part of a larger ecosystem that maintains their backend.
Because no middle managers will get promoted for doing this. All large corporate structures are the same: What's the incentive for the mini warlords to expand their mini empire? Nothing else is worth doing (to them).
AAAs use their own engines, or increasingly Unreal Engine, though. They usually prefer to get a contract and a neck to wring as far as vendor tools go.
>I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
Despite all the talk from libertarians about how private donations are the solution to the world's ills, open source software very rarely gets substantial donations.
Libertarians don't claim that they have "the solution to the world's ills". Just that the government is causing worse problems than it solves, and generally those problems can be handled by a free market.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
Historically, donations to charities drop when tax rates go down. As a percentage of income, donations were highest when tax rates were highest.
The best example that low tax rates don't increase giving: in 2017 the TCJA reduced tax rates for most people, and increased the standard deduction (but reduced the charitable deduction). Even though they were being taxed less and had more money to donate, Americans donated several billion less to charities each year (estimates very, but they're all between $15 and $20 billion less each year).
I want you to know I took some time research and educate myself on these claims.
From my findings, I could not find anything directly correlating the 2017 TCJA to total donations. The TCJA did change how deductions are treated, and more people opted to go with standard deductions instead of itemized deductions, but this is not the same as total donations. It is possible this incentivized people to donate less because they couldn't get as much of a tax write off.
For total donations, it has continued to trend upward despite some fluctuations, and a $20 billion swing is not a large deviation. The numbers I saw were $400+ billion during that time. Again, this has many more factors than the TCJA.
Most importantly, I'd like to reiterate that libertarians do not claim that cutting government will "solve" problems like open source projects getting enough funding. Just that it will give the free market an opportunity to find a balance. No big bill is going to solve these problems either, it will only make it worse. The end does not justify the mean. Stop taking people's money, and let them spend it on the things they find valuable even if you disagree with it.
I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)
These studios have profit margins in the multi-millions, they could afford a symbolic $100k donation. Instead they choose to push their developers through another crunch cycle.
> This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
For the hundredth time. He's an extremely rare person focused on quality, value, and competency. And he clearly just loves his own game
Edit: Sorry? Pay for what, and risk what why? AAA studios simply cannot deliver good value in comparison. The donation is unrelated—or perhaps, arguably, open source makes this productivity possible.
Beyond love, what you prefer ? Pay 100K USD, or put at risk your 500M USD project ?
Edit: if the engine is not maintained, there can be compatibility issues, it can go abandoned and lack new features, etc.
It's the technical pillar of the product, like Unity.
When you give money to help a pet shelter, or to feed kids in some far-away location, this is a donation. You give something, and you don't get anything back in return. Even a tax benefit, it doesn't change anything (as at the end you have to pay the same amount of money).
But now, what if you "donate" to a public park across the street from your house:
Is it charity? Yes, you are giving money to the city/trust that you don't have to give.
Do you benefit? Yes directly, your property value goes up and you have a nice place to walk.
Does that make it "not a donation"? No. It just makes it a smart donation or even sponsoring a project.
In all cases he is securing his own supply chain, and for a very cheap price. It is a very rational business expense.
I really hate that vision of the world with a passion. For people with such opinion nothing is ever enough or pure enough, but if you ask directly such people donate almost nothing themselves.
The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
> The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
(this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)
"Sponsoring", "Supporting", "Paying", "Hiring", "Contracting", etc, this is all ok.
but calling it charitable donation is a bit too much; calling "donation" money that you give that directly benefits your own interest is something I don't feel is right. It's only about the wording, not the action.
"I made a video game and now I chose to give 500 USD to help women who need shelter because they are beaten by their husbands", or even 50 USD, or 5 USD.
then yes, this is charity, and beautiful.
But this is very different to "I sent 100K USD to the project I absolutely and critically depend on".
It's not about the amount or doing "more", or that people are never satisfied, is that if you give to people who work in your interest, it's strategic sponsorship (or contractors...).
It's two very very different things, under the same word: "donation".
ConcernedApe's next game is also built on MonoGame, so he has self-interested reasons to want MonoGame to continue to be maintained. But just because ConcernedApe has self-interested reasons to donate doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't also come from a charitable place.
MonoGame is basically getting a sponsor. The ecosystem benefits. I'm personally happy to leave it there rather than asking for moral purity.
So the environmental impact isn't even worth mentioning?
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