Sims are a captive market: all enthusiasts just buy it once, and there’s limited number of enthusiasts. Companies either have finite money and resell the same sim again and again with a different coat of paint, or over promise and under deliver. Long gone are the days of a company that doesn’t need to be profitable (like Microsoft with the early flight sims, made at a loss to showcase and sell their OS), and games are more expensive to make nowadays, not less.

To break a captive market you either increase customers (not gonna happen, in fact simmers and interest in aviation is trending down compared with the 80s and 90s), or remove the market part altogether.

Removing the market is the solution: be need an open source sim for the community by the community. Sims and libraries that can aglutinate all work done in academia, gaming, and different styles of sims under one umbrella, bringing a symbiotic work that is way better than the separate parts. We need to pull a Blender.

We are in 2024. Sims suck. They are barely multi threaded. They reimplement all planes again and again, losing all info in what they falsely call themselves “a sim museum”.

We can do better.

Well, my employer pays me to maintain 100% of the time a specific security project that is deployed on Kubernetes. The project is donated to the CNCF (part to the Linux foundation), and my employer doesn’t push any of us in the team to work on any specifics, just to keep improving it in general. All development happens in the open, including slack chats, etc. (Would be happy to share the specific project, written in Rust mainly, but I don’t want to doxx this specific Lemmy account :D)

Mmh, and if I go by your nickname, you are Jason Kaye, influential hardcore DJ and dead since a year.

The customers (multinational and middle size companies, ranging from telecoms, banks, governments, goods and services) pay for support and features of the software. Software has always bugs and CVEs that need fixing, or new features, or needs for securing its supply chain (with SLSA, SBOMs, etc).

There’s a handful multibillionarie companies that follow this approach with open source: Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, etc. Particularly in cloud-native tech like Kubernetes and all that gets deployed on top of it.

If a technology is not open source it really doesn’t exist anymore. Customers have learned from the last 30 years and run away from vendor lock-in (AWS, AKS, Google cloud services…).

As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.