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…).

Spanish here. We have an army emergency unit with 4000 people just for this.

One needs to know that Spain is more of a federation than Germany or USA, as silly as it sounds, with regions being Autonomies that have more freedom from the central government than other places. This is a result of the end of the dictatorship in the 70s.

Here, the regional government received alerts from the central weather agency (AEMET) at 7am. They ignored them, (they had already reduced the staff in the regional emergency department). The central weather agency kept sending them updates with record breaking numbers,and the regional government completely ignored them. The TV cameras started recording the tsunami disaster at ~7pm. The regional government sent the alarms at ~10pm, hours after people were already dead.

Then, the regional government blocked the central govenrment from sending help, and didn’t ask themselves. By law, the regional government is the one that needs to make the decisions on how and when get the help and declare the emergency. They just didn’t. They are unfit for governing. They should go to jail.

Since the regional government, corrupt, is from one side of the political spectrum, and the central one is from the other side of the spectrum, you get a lot of apologists saying that “is everyone’s fault, miscommunication”. Make no mistake. They are aware, and choose to misrepresent the issue.

You can’t establish the precedent of breaking the law to bring out the army on the streets. Follow-up central governments may misuse it. Particularly in Spain, with all the history of terrorism, seccesionism, rising far-right, and a country divided by half politically that still hasn’t healed the mess left over by the untouched fascist dictatorship we had in the past.

The end result is that in other countries the responsible people (the regional gov) would resign. Here, i doubt that will happen… And rinse and repeat.

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