Free and open source software could overtake the proprietary software market in theory, but in practice it often fails since many FOSS projects are made for developers by other developers, most of who tend to be power users. And the average user needs ease of use, and easily accessible common functions, not a lightweight command-line interface with scripting.

Even then, things like games and other stuff might only will be partially FOSS, like engines and frameworks, the rest being behind a paywall. However, I think people should experiment with what I call "open source universes", which is basically creating shared universes that are open source. Maybe even make some open source RPG system with it too, so we could have an open source alternative to the likes of D&D, WH40k, etc. At one point I tried to make something like this, but the issue was that it was based on an old webcomic idea of mine, which I started working on when I had totally different views on many things. Might revisit it with different ideas later on.

Open source hardware will be a really hard uphill battle, with a large issue coming from closed-source drivers (Thanks ARM and nVidia!), cost and difficulty of manufacturing silicon, etc.

[–] UnkTheUnk@midwest.social 5 points 1 year ago

An important aspect of the success of D&D/40k has been fan creations and lore explainers. A challenge for growing a creative commons (alternatives is that there isn't a unified set of "cannon" stories for independent creators to make "TOP 10 WACKIEST THINGS IN [franchise]" which are the intellectual equivalent to baby food (which I don't mean as an insult).

then again, d&d and 40k are popular because the companies that own them decided to let smaller creators do the work of reprocessing the decades worth of lore into easily consumable and marketable chunks. Both the small creators and the central company got to symbiotically feed off of the brand value of the other. Then begins the enshitification once the brand reaches the mainstream

The problem for less centrally controlled media isn't just that there isn't decades worth interconnected lore within one overarching franchise, it's that stories that aren't centrally controlled will mutate and be remixed too much to have the sort of symbiotic brand growth of 40k and d&d

load more comments (3 replies)