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Comment by aflag | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, software is not (usually) that composable. If godot is a better engine all around, it would mean that competitors could offer a better service by just running godot in the cloud and charge per access, which they may be able to do for a cheaper price as they had very low initial investment.

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Well, of course it would take work to compose them together, but then the pay off is that you might be able to say customers are getting the "best of both worlds."

If their customers are also asking them for hosted Godot, maybe they should also offer that as another product offering, at a competitive price, and then use that as a sales funnel into their other products? That is usually the way it goes with these open source bits.

They may be able to respond positively to a threat, but it can still be a threat. It may pay off to try to compose godot's code into theirs, but it may very well be cheaper to just rewrite things within their own framework.

Anyway, I'm just saying that free software can be a competitor and that you can lose to it even if you can, technically, embed their source code. Even if software was perfectly composable that would be true, but it's even more possible given that you can't always just plug in any new features godot releases. They may even be implemented in different languages, for all we know.

I don't see how it is a threat. Assuming Godot obsoleted all their code entirely, that would still be a boon -- that's now code they don't have to spend time maintaining anymore, and they can just reuse that and focus on their core competency. (Maybe it's hosting, I don't know enough about this business)

Different languages actually isn't as bad an issue with this type of thing, as the idea with running it in the browser is that it all compiles down to Javascript or WASM.

You are not taking the whole market into consideration. Maybe they are good at writing the game engine and then hosting, but others may be better at just hosting. So, they could be outcompeted by people who don't want to pay the cost/risk of building an engine. Others may be better at hosting godot than they ever will, although those people would not be there if there was no godot or if godot was not free. Free software (copyleft licenses in special) can be a threat for commercial software in two ways: a. users may just jump to the free alternative and leave yours b. it levels the field so new competitors can come in without paying the initial investment you made.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that they are incorrect in assessing that godot is not a threat. They seem to consider they have other features beyond godot's scope which is what differentiate them in the market. What I am saying is that free software can certainly be a threat to a business. In fact, it can be even a larger threat than a single competitor, because it can turn your product into a commodity.

I still don't see what you mean. It sounds like you are saying the real threat would be if they had no other features that could let them stand out in the market, at which point a competitor would be able to beat them by lowering the price, possibly to zero. That can be done by any competitor and has very to do with the license -- my point is that the open source license on that "competing product" actually helps them, by allowing them to make use of the same thing without having to pay that initial investment again. And the first initial investment you made isn't lost as long as you keep a path to retaining those customers.

To put it another way, if the actual problem to the business is that they are falling behind on feature velocity and don't have the head count to keep up, re-using some features from open source code could actually help there.

If you can't keep up on feature velocity, you're fighting a losing game.

Yes -- so if the company falls behind, maybe using some open source code could help you keep up. At least that's what I've felt looking at things on github/gitlab/etc has helped with, if done the right way :)

Let me try to draw a picture. Say you have a web based game engine. It is the only game engine as a service in the market which also runs in a browser. Then, a popular open source game engine becomes web based too. Before, you had no competitors, now you have to compete against a product that's free.

You may lose some costumers that only cared about it being web based and who are willing to learn another engine. Not only that, a single guy decides to host the game engine in the cloud and charge really cheap for it. Now, if you want to compete in price, you probably have to fire all your game engine devs and significantly downsize. Either that or have vastly superiour features to justify your higher price in the eyes of the costumers. All that threats your company's existence.

I'm not saying it's impossible to compete, but the more overlap between your product and a free software product, the bigger the threat will be.

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