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Open ecosystem (Linux, hardware) + gaming = well done Valve, sounds good, I like it!



Not open source, however. Not a dealbreaker, but an important distinction to keep in mind.


My opinion, for a long time now, is that I'm just mildly anoyed that my games are not open source. It's not an important enough problem to do something about it.

Yeah, I really care about my software being open source. The most important a piece of softawre is, the more I care about it. Games just aren't that important. They are nice to have, and losing them is a disconfort, but won't have any practical effect on my life. So I don't care that much about them.

That said, because they are not open source there are security problems that must be dealt with. But, even if they were open source, if I really cared about securing my LAN, I wouldn't trust them. Not much of a change.


I've always thought the place open source can really shine in the gaming world is in the tools developers use to make games. An open source alternative to something like Unity could go a long way, I think.


Personally, I'm fine with Steam remaining closed-source, as this is both inevitable because of it being both a store and a DRM provider.

The key question here is whether Valve's future extensions to the graphics subsystems (which seem to be advertised, to some extent) will be released as open-source and be admitted to the (free software) kernel and libraries that exist today.


They have hired the head SDL developer and have greatly been moving the library forward, while keeping it open source, for instance.

Valve in a lot of respects is a strange company, they are relatively small and employee owned, and have a massive per employee profit margin, well into the "Fuck you money" bracket. I think their main driving incentive at this point is to make better games for its own sake. Based on the platform the chosen I think that means contributing back in a big way.

we are going to see a lot of really exciting stuff out of them


I don't see any reason why they would not. In fact, since they make money off the number of games sold, better graphics on all distros == more players == more $$.

Unless they want to advertise the "only Linux which runs games best!!!". But that seems unlikely


It'd be cool if Valve incentivized contributions to open source parts of their OS through Steam. E.g. if you fix a bug you get some sort of achievement, and if you fix several bugs you get something valuable like game coupons.


At the very least they should have some TF2 hats for code contributors!


Do we know it's not open source? Or are you talking specifically about steam and the games?


Users can alter or replace any part of the software

Sounds open source to me, or did you mean the games?

This press release isn't targeted at technical people so the jargon isn't there to definitively say one way or the other.


Yeah, I came to that conclusion just from reading it and ctrl-f'ing 'open', as I was in a rush. It looks like I may have been wrong.


Very true!




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