if this company goes out of business the source code dies with it.
Despite the fact that probably none of us had heard of them until today, it appears that FUTO has tremendously deep pockets so are very unlikely to go out of business any time soon (which Rossman mentioned in the comments of his video with a link to this one (that I haven’t yet watched) of his interview with the owner a year ago https://www.youtube.com/live/OJPmbcU-Vzo?si=DovtYTWTC3S1QIY-)
Futo (the organisation developing this app) appears to be a tech billionaire (Eron Wolf) firing his money at the tech industry until it stops being so shit.
This is from the about page on their website:
Our Three Pledges
We will never sell out. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to remain fiercely independent. They will never exacerbate the monopoly problem by selling out to a monopolist.
We will never abuse our customers. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to maintain an honest relationship with their customers. Revenue, if it exists, comes from customers paying directly for software and services. “The users are our product” revenue models are strictly prohibited.
We will always be transparently devoted to making delightful software. All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.
(From: https://futo.org/what-is-futo/)
What they say and what they will do could of course differ but they do go to great pains to paint themselves as fundamentally opposed to be sort of action you are worried about.
It isn’t free however they are very clear that they make no effort to make you pay for it. IE the app works whether you pay or not and they aren’t planning to change that. It’s not free in the same way WinRAR isn’t free. Here’s the announcement video from Louis Rossman where he talks about that. https://youtu.be/5DePDzfyWkw?si=KuNumtHUrtW_kHSC
I wouldn’t trust a sandwich made by one of his companies.
I just hope there aren’t too many consequences for other people along with it.
To be clear, he did try to make them use his own work instead and it was awful so they pushed him out to protect the company.
He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.
No he doesn’t. He meddles and interferes constantly and convinces himself that he’s adding value by doing so. That’s why Neuralink is dangerous. Meta or Alphabet or Microsoft or whoever can be trusted to let the scientists and the legal team ensure there’s very little risk of everything blowing up in their face horribly. Elon’s little empire is constantly on the verge of an absolute disaster. I would not be remotely surprised if Neuralink messes everything up so much that it sets back brain implants and BCI’s in general by decades. Purely because Elon can’t just supply the people at his businesses with the tools they need then get out of their way.
It’s slightly different when you show consumers you’re willing to screw them out of nowhere than when you show businesses that you’ll do so. People shake that stuff off as an annoyance because they aren’t dependant on those businesses behaving decently in order for them to keep the lights on. When a partner shows it could randomly kill your business at any moment for no good reason, you tend to realise the importance of disengaging from them.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that because there is an option to install via Steam that people should stop downloading directly from Godot’s website though. Both of those things can exist beside one another.
Because if you want professional game developers to exist then you have to be welcoming to them when they are just aspiring game developers. Kids who play lots of games and want to have a fiddle around with tools for making games are much more likely to do so if there is a way to access them that they are familiar with and already associate with gaming.
For indie game development in general as of Godot 4.
In the comment you replied to they meant video game development companies by “developers” not the individual employees at those companies who do the actual work of developing games. Typically the actions of video game development companies are driven by the MBAs who have most of the big picture decision making power rather than the individual employees who develop the games.
Everyone in this thread is failing to understand that “developers” in this context can mean both “people who develop videogames” and “businesses that develop videogames.” As the people who develop videogames are not always the ones who make decisions like this at businesses that develop videogames those two different things that everyone is using the same word for often have opposing positions on the matter.
In my eyes it’s no different than a publisher selling a book that is in the public domain. You’re not paying them for their copyright, you’re paying them for everything else that goes into putting a physical copy of that text into your hands.
I’m not so sure about that. Lots of unbearable people seem to have very active social lives.
Hey, I just realised that the link I shared was a response to my comment not yours and so you may not have seen it.
This is a recent article about a successful brain implant that has been completed by a different organisation to help a paralysed man gain some amount of control of body parts he previously couldn’t control. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-brain-chip-paralysed-trial-b2386217.html
That’s really poor moderation. Do you have the details of where to look to see it all?
I suspect for most of them it’s not even about how much money they have so much as it is about optimising the rate of growth of their wealth. IE, they don’t care so much about the total amount they have so much as the amount they have coming in.
Here’s an example that popped up in a feed for me just now. An article from a reputable British newspaper about an American organisation (that isn’t mismanaged by a self-aggrandizing, lunatic, grifter) successfully implanting chips into a the brain of a man who was paralyzed from the chest down to restore movement and sensation to his limbs.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-brain-chip-paralysed-trial-b2386217.html
I’m not sure if you are aware already but the reason Epic are announcing a million changes to their business is that the previous business plan was based around them successfully throwing a fortune at suing Apple to force them to support 3rd party apps and they tried and failed.
I think if it were ever going to happen that way, Epic would have succeeded.
That’s not to say it won’t still happen one day through political means. Seems plausible the EU might force it at some stage.