6 ms·

Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?

39 points by donteatbark 14y ago

swernoxidation 14y ago
This post is open source.
antidoh 14y ago
Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell food?
- mquander 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?
  - bmj 14y ago
    Actually, there's another element to growing food you missed: industrial agriculture companies actually have "closed source" seeds. Scientists muck with the genetics of the plant, and one effect is that a farmer can no longer glean seeds for their next crop--they are forced to purchase more from the supplier. Some people may not find that to particularly ethical, either.
- yuhong 14y ago
  It is not unethical to sell software, but software and other digital things at the core is a set of easily copiable bits, while food isn't, and it takes food to write software.
  - mmphosis 14y ago
    I believe that it is unethical to knowingly sell something that is harmful. At the core of food are plants that have a set of easily copiable and modifiable DNA. Apparently, biotech corps think that they have DRM on plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
- michael_michael 14y ago
  See here for more information on the distinction between free (gratis) vs free (libre) as it relates to software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
- mrsteveman1 14y ago
  I don't think that's their position actually, only that it's unethical to sell someone software they have no control over and no legal right to alter or work to understand, particularly if the software is actively undermining the user in various ways as DRM would. It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation. However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case. So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.
  - ridiculous_fish 14y ago
    Regarding the food comparison: Coca Cola is not behaving unethically by protecting their secret recipe. They have a responsibility to share allergen and nutritional information, but they have no obligation to provide sufficient information to reproduce their product. Extending the analogy to software, if your program accesses personal information, contacts remote servers, inserts itself into the kernel, etc. then you have an ethical obligation to publish that behavior. But there's no ethical obligation to provide the source code, and indeed, providing the source code wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your other obligations (because it wouldn't be accessible to 99% of users).
    - mrsteveman1 14y ago
      I actually think food is in a unique position where divulging every last ingredient is the only ethical way to do it. They may only have a current legal obligation to disclose known allergens, but that changes, we discover food sensitivities and reactions after things have been in wide use for long periods of time. Trusting the company and the regulatory bodies isn't enough with food. If that means someone else can come along and reproduce it, tough.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
drivingmenuts 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mikegerwitz 14y ago
  Nowhere does GNU or the FSF advocate preventing the user from doing as they please; the user is more than welcome to use a DRM-infected system if they choose to do so. We simply discourage it.
- lambda 14y ago
  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.
newsoundwave 14y ago
"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.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Sorry, my post wasn't meant to be an attack on the FSF at all, I assure you. I care too. But I'm not every user and I'm not prescribing something for someone else. I'm all in favor of (the FSF) informing people and empowering people to choose free software free of DRM, but I'm also not going to imply that using a free OS means forgoing games or other things that might require DRM because developers (think they) need it to protect their IP and make a profit.
  - kzrdude 14y ago
    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.
dsrguru 14y ago
"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
- Mizza 14y ago
  RMS is pretty reasonable! He gets a bad rap, I think. It's like people watch his every move like, "Oh man, what's that craaaazzyyy old man going to do next?" Of course, he's actually right 4 times out of 5. I thought the point he made in this article was a balanced one.
  - dsrguru 14y ago
    I agree that he was pretty reasonable in the case of this article, but he is a bit crazy by most people's standards. A friend of mine has worked for the FSF and told me that Stallman won't even use the World Wide Web! Anything he needs looked up he has coworkers do for him because they're foolish enough to trust that nonfree web sites aren't malicious.
    - koeselitz 14y ago
      It's not strictly true that he only has other people do it for him: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979 As far as the internet, though, as I told a friend long ago - Richard Stallman doesn't need the internet. The internet needs Richard Stallman.
      - dsrguru 14y ago
        He posted that to a newsgroup, not the Web. I'm sure he wasn't using the Web to do that, especially given the content of that post!
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  That surprised me as well, I'm sure I've heard him say before that nonfree software is 100% unethical even on a free platform. Perhaps he realises that having steam + valve games would be a huge net win for desktop linux use. Even if you had mainly nonfree software , in theory desktop linux would still be quite a free system in the sense that there would be a level playing field amongst software devs.
cheebla 14y ago
Just to be clear, when he says "nonfree" he means free as in speech, not free as in beer, right?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  yes, you can basically always assume that with stallman
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mynegation 14y ago
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?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Not sure why this got downvoted. Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.
- artsrc 14y ago
  > 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.
- reedlaw 14y ago
  All other things being equal, I'd still prefer a free (as in speech) game over a non-free one. The idea that I could go in and change some behavior is so compelling that I would probably spend more for such a game than its closed-source counterpart.
- wtracy 14y ago
  This does make me wonder what Stallman would say about games where all the executable code is FOSS, but the art assets still have all rights reserved. Granted, such games are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of at all are some of iD's games, and even those were only opened long after the games' initial release dates.)
ced 14y ago
Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?
- anonymoushn 14y ago
  It is reasonable and possible to program these games in such a way that the client is assumed to be malicious, but this is not a common practice. Preventing cheating would be possible in the general case. For most existing games, though, a modified client already enables the user to cheat. It is just more difficult to create it without the source.
- koeselitz 14y ago
  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.
  - ced 14y ago
    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.
forkrulassail 14y ago
Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.
- forkrulassail 14y ago
  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.
jfoster 14y ago
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.
wjs 14y ago
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.

39 points by donteatbark 14y ago

swernoxidation 14y ago

This post is open source.

antidoh 14y ago

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

mquander 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?
- bmj 14y ago
  Actually, there's another element to growing food you missed: industrial agriculture companies actually have "closed source" seeds. Scientists muck with the genetics of the plant, and one effect is that a farmer can no longer glean seeds for their next crop--they are forced to purchase more from the supplier. Some people may not find that to particularly ethical, either.
yuhong 14y ago
It is not unethical to sell software, but software and other digital things at the core is a set of easily copiable bits, while food isn't, and it takes food to write software.
- mmphosis 14y ago
  I believe that it is unethical to knowingly sell something that is harmful. At the core of food are plants that have a set of easily copiable and modifiable DNA. Apparently, biotech corps think that they have DRM on plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
michael_michael 14y ago
See here for more information on the distinction between free (gratis) vs free (libre) as it relates to software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
mrsteveman1 14y ago
I don't think that's their position actually, only that it's unethical to sell someone software they have no control over and no legal right to alter or work to understand, particularly if the software is actively undermining the user in various ways as DRM would. It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation. However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case. So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.
- ridiculous_fish 14y ago
  Regarding the food comparison: Coca Cola is not behaving unethically by protecting their secret recipe. They have a responsibility to share allergen and nutritional information, but they have no obligation to provide sufficient information to reproduce their product. Extending the analogy to software, if your program accesses personal information, contacts remote servers, inserts itself into the kernel, etc. then you have an ethical obligation to publish that behavior. But there's no ethical obligation to provide the source code, and indeed, providing the source code wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your other obligations (because it wouldn't be accessible to 99% of users).
  - mrsteveman1 14y ago
    I actually think food is in a unique position where divulging every last ingredient is the only ethical way to do it. They may only have a current legal obligation to disclose known allergens, but that changes, we discover food sensitivities and reactions after things have been in wide use for long periods of time. Trusting the company and the regulatory bodies isn't enough with food. If that means someone else can come along and reproduce it, tough.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

drivingmenuts 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mikegerwitz 14y ago
Nowhere does GNU or the FSF advocate preventing the user from doing as they please; the user is more than welcome to use a DRM-infected system if they choose to do so. We simply discourage it.
lambda 14y ago
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.

newsoundwave 14y ago

"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.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Sorry, my post wasn't meant to be an attack on the FSF at all, I assure you. I care too. But I'm not every user and I'm not prescribing something for someone else. I'm all in favor of (the FSF) informing people and empowering people to choose free software free of DRM, but I'm also not going to imply that using a free OS means forgoing games or other things that might require DRM because developers (think they) need it to protect their IP and make a profit.
- kzrdude 14y ago
  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.

dsrguru 14y ago

"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

Mizza 14y ago
RMS is pretty reasonable! He gets a bad rap, I think. It's like people watch his every move like, "Oh man, what's that craaaazzyyy old man going to do next?" Of course, he's actually right 4 times out of 5. I thought the point he made in this article was a balanced one.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  I agree that he was pretty reasonable in the case of this article, but he is a bit crazy by most people's standards. A friend of mine has worked for the FSF and told me that Stallman won't even use the World Wide Web! Anything he needs looked up he has coworkers do for him because they're foolish enough to trust that nonfree web sites aren't malicious.
  - koeselitz 14y ago
    It's not strictly true that he only has other people do it for him: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979 As far as the internet, though, as I told a friend long ago - Richard Stallman doesn't need the internet. The internet needs Richard Stallman.
    - dsrguru 14y ago
      He posted that to a newsgroup, not the Web. I'm sure he wasn't using the Web to do that, especially given the content of that post!
jiggy2011 14y ago
That surprised me as well, I'm sure I've heard him say before that nonfree software is 100% unethical even on a free platform. Perhaps he realises that having steam + valve games would be a huge net win for desktop linux use. Even if you had mainly nonfree software , in theory desktop linux would still be quite a free system in the sense that there would be a level playing field amongst software devs.

cheebla 14y ago

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

jiggy2011 14y ago
yes, you can basically always assume that with stallman

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mynegation 14y ago

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?

jiggy2011 14y ago
Not sure why this got downvoted. Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.
artsrc 14y ago
> 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.
reedlaw 14y ago
All other things being equal, I'd still prefer a free (as in speech) game over a non-free one. The idea that I could go in and change some behavior is so compelling that I would probably spend more for such a game than its closed-source counterpart.
wtracy 14y ago
This does make me wonder what Stallman would say about games where all the executable code is FOSS, but the art assets still have all rights reserved. Granted, such games are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of at all are some of iD's games, and even those were only opened long after the games' initial release dates.)

ced 14y ago

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

anonymoushn 14y ago
It is reasonable and possible to program these games in such a way that the client is assumed to be malicious, but this is not a common practice. Preventing cheating would be possible in the general case. For most existing games, though, a modified client already enables the user to cheat. It is just more difficult to create it without the source.
koeselitz 14y ago
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.
- ced 14y ago
  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.

forkrulassail 14y ago

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

forkrulassail 14y ago
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.

jfoster 14y ago

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.

wjs 14y ago

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.