smallfry on 10/3/2010 at 23:36

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Sorry to invalidate your entire post, but "Free Software" does not mean "Open Source Software."

Aaaanyway, I feel like Valve has lots to gain and little to lose by making their games cross-platform. I can see not wanting to provide technical support to Linux versions, but there's nothing that says they have to (Linux users are used to relying on things like forums and newsgroups). Another thing is many Linux users are very loyal. My brother, for example, buys games for Linux even if they're not great, just to support the developers and to encourage them and others to provide Linux versions of their games.

smallfry on 11/3/2010 at 01:53

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Well, okay, but if that's what he was referring to it still has nothing to do with Valve releasing a Linux version of steam.

baeuchlein on 11/3/2010 at 19:49

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I was going into that direction, yes. And while it's right that those people don't have absolute power and completely prevent "unwanted" programs from entering the Linux Realm, they can be a big roadblock nevertheless.

Two good examples of this can be seen with Debian. The people behind it want it to be completely made of GPL software, and therefore Debian's standard installation programs mainly provide support for software published under the GPL. During the last few years, Debian kicked out two well-known program suites because their authors did not want to publish the suites under the GPL, but rather a less-open license (at least that's what Debian people said). One of them, the CD writing suite "cdrtools", including mkisofs and cdrecord, may not be well known to the public, since these programs were written for console use instead of working with a GUI. The other suite, however, was the X Window system itself, the thing that could be called the "Linux GUI", although it means simplifying things somewhat. They switched from XFree86 to an older version of X, called it X.Org, and expand upon that now.

Debian is even hardcore enough to exclude Firefox and Thunderbird just because their icons are not GPL'ed. Instead, they created two replacements for these programs just to get rid of the accursed copyrighted icon. I'd call that a bit stupid, but I'm not the Debian staff, I just use Debian stuff.;)

This does not necessarily mean you can't run other Linux programs with Debian, it basically means you won't be able to install them via Debian's installer. For less experienced Linux users, this might already be enough to scare them off, while others might just say, "so I'll have to do it myself, then".

However, I've had some bad experiences when trying to install "non-Debian" stuff into the Debian system. In most cases it didn't work well. One even managed to trash the system well enough so that only a re-install of Linux got the system back to run stable. I have no idea whether other Linux distributions differ much in that regard, but from a large testing session I did a few years back I got the impression that while other distributions may be better in one specific place, they are worse concerning other things. So I stay with Debian, for the time being.

One may ask now what this has to do with Valve's ambitions to get Steam running in Linux. At first glance, there's no connection, but if you look closer, things are a bit different.



If Valve wants to integrate their Steam system with any operating system, they can do it much better when getting information about the operating system's internals, and the preferred means would possibly not to obtain the source code only, but the option to communicate with people programming this system. And if they're of the hardcore GPL kind, they might just say "no" and ignore Valve, thus making it a lot harder to get Steam to run well in Linux. Considering further that Valve wants to make money with Steam, they can't afford too high costs when porting Steam to the Linux platform, especially since it's not exactly a common desktop environment. That part is mainly occupied by Windows (and any Mac equivalent; OS X, if I'm not mixing up things there).

So, Valve might just not be interested anymore in that after thinking about it.



I see some benefits from open source software, and generally prefer it if I have a choice and the OSS solution is good enough in terms of quality. However, I'm not a fanatic there, after all I'm still using Windows and will likely continue to do so for quite a while.

I have not looked much into OSS source code so far, especially since Linux is mainly written in C, and I don't understand that. When I was hunting down a bug in Linux one or two years ago, I was able to pinpoint the location of the problem - but I did not understand what the code did there. Later on, the problem was solved somehow with an upgrade (surprising me, to be honest). But it's still a bit better than the closed source approch, which basically means no one outside the publishing company can remove any kind of bug from the software.



Right (although OSS is not exactly anti-corporate, but closely related on many occasions). And whether one prefers a community held together by ideology and duct-tape or rather one held together by another ideology and earning money is more or less everyone's own decision to make. I prefer to use the best of both worlds, since none of them alone satisfies me enough.

Jason Moyer on 11/3/2010 at 22:27

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There's no reason to even care about what distro someone is using, or even if they're running it using linux-compatible libraries on another operating system. All that matters is which libraries it's dependent on.

Ulukai on 12/3/2010 at 11:12

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I already said damn near exactly that, did you not read the thread?