Facebook and Godot

fire7side

What does everyone think of Facebook's undisclosed contribution to the Godot engine? Personally, I don't understand where all the hate comes from for Facebook. I think this would be a good opportunity for Godot if Meta takes off.

Erich_L

Motivated mostly by XR? Yuck. But also- hurray! Money! I love facebook! It's my favorite place to make rude comments on @Bimbam's stuff.

cybereality

It's free money. I don't agree with a lot of big companies, but open source needs sponsors. People can't just work for free forever.

Megalomaniak

Yeah I'd say just general mistrust of big corpos, especially ones that see you, the consumer, as the product.

fire7side

@Megalomaniak said: Yeah I'd say just general mistrust of big corpos, especially ones that see you, the consumer, as the product.

I don't like being followed around by them. I always shut down my browser after I'm done with facebook, but I've been followed by all kinds of sites. As far as between them and like youtube or twitter, facebook doesn't outright sensor people that don't agree with them as much. They'll put a link in for anti-vax statements to another source, which is a lot more mature in my book.

fire7side

@Erich_L said: Motivated mostly by XR? Yuck. But also- hurray! Money! I love facebook! It's my favorite place to make rude comments on @Bimbam's stuff.

I'm not quite ready to wear black goggles while I'm on the computer. Especially if I'm in the middle of the room. Luckily my living room is too full of who knows what to do something like that. Actually, though, it sounds kind of fun, like Wii sports when it first came out but even more immersive. The price is coming down too. I can see using it for certain games, but like puzzle games or things like that wouldn't be a big deal with it.

Erich_L

VR/XR does absolutely nothing for the type of game I like to play. From the people I know, it would seem that people who own Wii sports or similar products will be at least interested in VR stuff.

Bimbam

React (MIT)...Pytorch(BSD)...Zstd( BSD/GPLv2)... the list goes on

Facebook have already established themselves as providing innovations freely for the community so don't see this as a threat at all, just good press/potentially more XR developers for them and more money for development for us.

I don't personally care much for VR, XR slightly more so from a work perspective (it's useful to showcase street-scaping project designs before they're built for example), but ultimately both require a rock solid/efficient 3D rendering engine, soooooo :D

cybereality

Honestly, it's the Stallman neckbeards that will kill Linux and open-source. The only way it's going to work is if big companies can use FOSS software and contribute (either through donations or dedicated staff). There is just too much work on a game engine and too many people needed to do it alone with no funding. Of course, donations from users help, but it's hard to maintain this. Even Blender had tons of corporate sponsors. It can't be an us versus them thing, as a bunch of nerds coding in their basement can never beat a company with billions of dollars in cash and thousands of employees they can tell to do whatever. So it has to be a synergy.

xyz

The only problematic thing here is that the sum is not disclosed.

cybereality

@xyz said: The only problematic thing here is that the sum is not disclosed.

No, the sum was never disclosed. But based on what I read from some vague comments from people in the know, it sounded like it was about $100,000 or somewhere in that range (not more than $200,000).

some_lame_kid

I'm a born punk and paranoid as hell. I have no better reason than Facebook has given infinitely more reasons to not trust them than otherwise. I think that's a fair reason though Godot is in fact open source. If there truly was something suspicious going on with the deal regarding the software itself, someone might have found it by now. I hope. I think the deal isn't any shadier than Facebook borrowing from Godot to build some of their own code base in return for much needed funding, but, what the hell do I know, right?

cybereality

Well the way Godot is set up, no one can buy it or control it. Even if Facebook had $10 gazillion dollars in cash, they couldn't buy Godot. So there is no danger at all, and the founders were smart to set it up like this.

Megalomaniak

@some_lame_kid said: I think the deal isn't any shadier than Facebook borrowing from Godot to build some of their own code base in return for much needed funding, but, what the hell do I know, right?

They would not have to contribute anything for that, godot is MIT licensed.

some_lame_kid

@Megalomaniak said:\ They would not have to contribute anything for that, godot is MIT licensed. Wait, you're right. I'm lost again.

fire7side

I would think they contributed to Godot because it's in their interest to have a free tool to make things for the metaverse. It might be a little hard to get it to work with Godot and not be bound by the license, but I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Megalomaniak

@fire7side said: It might be a little hard to get it to work with Godot and not be bound by the license, but I'm sure they'll figure it out.

I think more users should actually read Godots license.

Copyright (c) 2007-2021 Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur. Copyright (c) 2014-2021 Godot Engine contributors.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

-- Godot Engine <https://godotengine.org>

The expat license is really easy to be in compliance with.

jbskaggs

The distrust is discussed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,extend,and_extinguish

Also facebook games is huge money market. My friends over at Defold some sell solely on Facebook games. If you have casual games and want the gen x boomer market - there ya go. When I first wrote my Rabbits game I was thinking of releasing it on FB as what I write tends to be more for older gamers who like casual games. Tough they had some revamping of their game system when I got sick and I dont know what has changed in the past year and half with facebook games or how viable it still is.

Facebook wants more content they can sell directly with out app store etc. So its in their interest to fund free game engines that easily make mobile and pc games. Godot is a good fit.

Plus unless the amount is greater than several millions that is money made and lost in an hour on facebook just on market changes, let alone ad revenue or subsidiary flow. Now if was some unnamed investor that has managed to take over 40% of Epic, and was behind some major pc release scandals that were promised PC sequels and instead came out as cell phone games then Id be worried.

cybereality

I used to make Facebook Flash games at one point. You can still make money, sure, but it is nothing like the early days. People have moved on, it's nowhere near as big as it used to be. I think Facebook (well Meta, now, they are no longer Facebook technically) are more interested in VR since that is the future. I think web games will still be big, but like the weird stuff on Itch, no one likes FarmVille anymore.

fire7side

We're kind of inundated with games now so there really isn't much of a platform beyond Steam and a few of those. Casual games are all over the place and they don't offer much variety anymore. Phone games are kind of there yet, but how do you even choose a game out of all that. I try one off and on with my tablet, but most I play for a few minutes and then eventually delete them. If you come up with a good idea it will get copied to death. Everyone thinks VR is the next thing, but it could just be a flash in the pan also. It's a little weird wearing a frog man mask in your house where other people can see you zonked out in a game waving your arms around. It's not like making choices on a tablet or phone. You still kind of look like a human being. It might take off. It's hard to say. Everyone is chasing the next big thing but a large percentage go nowhere. VR has been around for a long time and it's not exactly growing in leaps and bounds that I can see. It kind of looks like a niche.