Technology

C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don't lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.

For what it's worth, C# is a ECMA standardized language (https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-334/) and has a linux-based implementation (mono -- https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/).

Though it is hard to overcome the obvious Windows origins of the first implementation.

Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.

This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you'll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.

Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that's a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it's a lesson very well learned.

For me, it’s “learn everything”.

The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.

What is a community? Recommended reading: Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.

"The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you... but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive."

"let's see...areas for improvement. 'Fewer death threats towards co-workers"."

There won't be another annual review if the company stops existing

It is, but all we have right now is Unity's claim that this is what happened. We don't even know the content of the threat, who made it, why they made it. All of that context could cast this in a wildly different light. I am very suspicious of Unity the company's motives here in saying this when we haven't heard from anyone else.

It might have been wiser, but seems to me we got to a point we should be thinking of the circumstances.

Besides, that only would have solved their individual problem, IF they even managed it. The way the company is being run would remain the same. How it would impact all the people who rely on that engine would remain the same.

It's "never acceptable" to threaten someone, but intentionally ruining countless people's livelihoods is "nothing personal". Something is off about that.

The CEO and his cronies don't understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.

However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it's dominance among other things because it's an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would've otherwise had trouble getting into development.