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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
by NotOscarWilde 13y ago
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.
- throwaway2048 13y agoThey 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
- pm90 13y agoI 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
- bloaf 13y agoIt'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.
- wtracy 13y agoAt the very least they should have some TF2 hats for code contributors!