
Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad? - donteatbark
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html
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mynegation
Why would I care?

I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole
nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I
have the option of taking over the maintenance.

But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-
lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of
diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but story editors, 2D/3D artists,
composers, voice artists etc that create experience, not a tool or platform.
Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could
improve upon them? Or may be you want to get your hands on petabytes of data
that went into production of Avatar so that you could fix a couple of
landscapes?

~~~
artsrc
> Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could
> improve upon them?

We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it.

Games _are_ entertainment.

Games _are_ culture.

I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays
e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current
technology.

There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and
copyright holders can't stop them being made available.

I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of
Congress, because I value software.

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dsrguru
"My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm."

Did rms just admit that proprietary software can theoretically have benefits?
What's this world coming to lol

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pippy
Programmers have to eat, and free software needs a supporting paradigm to be
sustainable. With Firefox it's the search engine, with Apache it's support,
only smaller projects can be made from pure passion. Any large company porting
software to a platform will be good, as more people (and thus support) will
come to Linux.

>Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny
freedom to their users

I get the feeling he lives in a fantasy world. Unethical is hitting a baby in
the face, not allowing people to see how you wrote a computer programme.

~~~
jiggy2011
Just because you are not doing something directly and obviously "evil" like
hitting a baby does not mean something cannot be unethical.

As more of our world is software and we rely on it to do things like store our
personal information and trust it to respect our privacy etc, how is the
availability and ability to understand and inspect that software not a
potentially very ethical issue?

~~~
pippy
Yes you're right. I was trying to frame ethics in its popular definition. I
personally love and support open source projects, as they are better from a
moral standpoint.

Proprietary software isn't a _really_ bad thing, comparing it to say murder or
thievery. If you had to choose between doing the wrong thing (which isn't that
bad) and not eating, most people would do the wrong thing.

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newsoundwave
"If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having these games on your
computer."

I feel like restricting the definition of freedom fairly narrowly goes against
the very definition of freedom itself... but then again he's free to do that
too.

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cheebla
Just to be clear, when he says "nonfree" he means free as in speech, not free
as in beer, right?

~~~
jiggy2011
yes, you can basically always assume that with stallman

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wjs
I think it's important to add that regardless of whether proprietary games are
_wrong_ , he points to two initiatives (Liberated Pixel Cup and the
LibrePlanet Gaming Collective) that are promoting and developing free games.
Those are worthy of support even by people who many not be convinced that all
games should be free. Personally, I think they should be -- games can have
backdoors and antifeatures like any other program. They can be used to control
the user. Game code is also re-usable in contexts that aren't games, and it
has educational value. It has all the problems that locking away knowledge
usually does. Game companies have also been some of the most aggressive when
it comes to trying to control users.

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jfoster
This is the closest I've seen them come to recognizing that the importance of
free software may vary by where it sits in the stack. Think about it... the
full stack of applications is a tree, right? A free root node is much more
important than a free leaf node.

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ced
Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it
impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?

~~~
koeselitz
No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing
and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier
to cheating. There are dozens of parallel projects that demonstrate this;
perhaps the most obvious is Bitcoin. There are breakins with Bitcoin, but the
threshold is very high, and it's pretty clear that only the most intelligent
and savvy attackers make off with cash.

In general, people sometimes ask this question about FOSS and security. Isn't
FOSS bad for security, they say, since attackers can look at your code and
find the holes so they can break in? What this assumes is that the holes are
inevitable and obvious, and all anyone needs to break in is find them. It
turns out that this isn't true, as many security-sensitive open source
projects from OpenBSD to Mozilla Firefox have demonstrated. Security holes
shouldn't exist; help from the community to prevent this is key. The hope that
code will be more secure if we only keep it secret - otherwise known as
"security through obscurity" - is a pipe dream.

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ced
_No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing
and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier
to cheating._

How would that work? If I have the source code of Starcraft, I can turn on the
"Make the whole map visible" variable, and there's nothing whatsoever that
encryption can do to prevent that. With closed-source, as far as I know,
Blizzard's constant patching makes cheating relatively uncommon on their own
servers.

~~~
replax
Your Starcraft example is flawed, because Starcraft is NON OSS. Therefore,
they chose other means of cheating prevention. You might argue that it is
security by obscurity but it is working more or less to a certain extend.

I have an example of OSS software with yet no cheater. Check out xonotic
(www.xonotic.org), a heavily modified quake based shooter. They partly
implement anti-cheat functionality by more or less shifting tasks from the
client side to the server side, making e.g. wallhacks impossible. Also they
use encryption for certain packages to prevent them from being tapered with.
Aimbots are another thing, but I have yet to see one. I didn't really dig into
the security features though, that is just what I picked up by casually
browsing the forums...

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antidoh
Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell
food?

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mquander
Free as in speech, not free as in beer, etc. It's not particularly ethical to
sell food and refuse to tell anyone what's in the food, which is why we have
various laws regarding that. Nor does it seem particularly reasonable to sell
someone food under the condition that if they eat it in particular ways,
you'll sue them.

~~~
alecbenzer
While I understand this concept, is it not another consideration that people
should receive compensation for their work? In most areas these two goals
don't seem to conflict with one another, but in software they seem to, at
least a bit, and I don't think I've ever seen something from rms or the fsf
addressing this notion. Even if RMS's position is "Freedom is _absolutely_
uncompromisable in any form whatsoever, and the need for freedom takes
complete precedence over the ability for people to receive payment for
software", I'd like to hear him say that (unless he has and I've never come
across it).

I don't think Valve is being unethical in protecting their games. They're not
controlling their products because "fuck you consumers, we are evil and wish
to suppress your rights", they're doing it (at least I presume) because if
they didn't, no one would buy their games and they wouldn't be able to
operate. A food vendor can't make a similar claim (well, at least not in as
strong a way -- though I guess there are things like secret recipes) to
justify hiding things from consumers.

~~~
jiggy2011
Whenever rms has been asked this question he has 2 answers.

1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work) and 2) Crowdsourcing

The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client)
would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it
promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the
actual end users will not get freedom with the software it will really just be
senior management.

~~~
alecbenzer
Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?

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forkrulassail
Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.

~~~
forkrulassail
Games are the last vestige of the Windows platform that still chain my
students to the platform. If they could game (with the latest and greatest
games) on *nix, then, the battle is mostly won, no more dual booting, no more
worrying about crappy Windows dev tools.

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drivebyacct2
Nonfree? Okay.

DRM? Groan.

But really, who cares, let the user decide. Why does the freeness of the OS
have to predicate the distribution, license or otherwise of the software used
on it?

~~~
tikhonj
The FSF _does not_ dictate what you can and cannot install on your system!
They really do "let the user decide".

However, just because you are free to do something does not mean you _should_.
All the FSF is doing is presenting a clear, well-argued and rather balanced
argument about whether you _should_ support non-free games on Linux or not.

This is a complex issue and it is treated as a complex issue; all they do is
provide their views on what would further free software most.

As to who cares: anybody who supports freedom of software cares. And, while
such people are in the minority here (going off the OS poll I saw a while
back), they still make up a significant percentage of the audience.

~~~
kzrdude
Well it is a bit strange that they do not for example endorse Debian, which is
really principled on free software but lets the user decide what to install.

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swernoxidation
This post is open source.

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drivingmenuts
It's up to the end user - if the GNU movement is somehow planning on
restricting the ability of the user to use DRM'd software on their own
systems, then they've gone completely off the rails.

~~~
lambda
Where in that did you see him advocating preventing the user from installing
Steam? He's just saying that installing proprietary, DRM'd software reduces
your freedom; so if you want to promote freedom, you shouldn't install that
software on your computer.

One thing to keep in mind is that most of the time, he doesn't want to force
anyone to do anything (other than make sure that code free if it was written
under the GPL, even when modifications are made). He just suggests that people
who value freedom do or don't do certain things.

