notkevinjohn

As a software engineer outside the gaming industry (I'm in industrial manufacturing), it seems to me like the industry doesn't really adopt open-source the way that other industries have. Am I just not seeing the use of open-source software in professional gaming studios? Or do you agree that other industries use open-source software more extensively and have things to say about why the gaming industry doesn't seem to?

Cool. You didn't mention the one factor I kind of expected you to, which is competition. Do you feel like the competitiveness of the gaming industry is different than the competitiveness of different industries to the extent that it might discourage studios from going with the open source approach, both in terms of bringing open-sources packages into their builds, and in terms of open-sourcing their code to give back to community? Or does that just not play a significant role in the open-source calculus for the gaming industry?

I'm an electronics engineer and I often need to take close up pictures of circuit boards, or have others take them and send them to me. Most of the inexpensive digital cameras I find have minimum focal distances that are far too big for taking close up images that are in focus enough to read the silk screens on the boards. Is there a relatively inexpensive camera/lens combination that you could recommend for doing close in work that doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to be functional?

Thanks, it seems like you might have engaged with my comment purely from the perspective of being a potential consumer of open-source tools; but of course industries that take advantage of open-source software are also sort of expected to be contributors to open-source tools. Is there anything you might wan to say about why the gaming industry doesn't seem to be engaging with the supply side of open source?

(or, of course, to correct me if I am wrong and they are engaging with that more than I assert).

I genuinely don't know. It seems like its sort of a situation where the incentive structure is always going to push companies towards less transparency, because they have very little to gain by risking making things more transparent and they take on significant risk. In the long run, I think open hardware could win out for the same reason open sourced software continues to gain market-share, but that's not the kind of thing that applies to existing companies.