How Will Steam on GNU/Linux Affect Software Freedom? 580
rms has published his thoughts on Steam coming to GNU/Linux. He notes that the availability of proprietary games may very well help spread GNU/Linux (but the FSF prioritizes spreading software freedom). And, you're better off at least having a Free operating system instead of Windows: "My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community? Any GNU/Linux distro that comes with software to offer these games will teach users that the point is not freedom. Nonfree software in GNU/Linux distros already works against the goal of freedom. Adding these games to a distro would augment that effect."
Or: How will the FOSS community affect Valve? Already they've contributed a bit to the graphics stack, hired a few folks from inside the community, etc. But Steam also makes use of DRM and distributes software in ways that are opposed to the ideals of many in the FOSS community (and even the wider Free Culture community). Given Gabe Newell's professed love for openness, might we see their company culture infiltrated?
And you are why... (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux has failed on the desktop for the past decades and will continue to fail on the desktop in the future decades.
Face it the ONLY thing bringing Linux to the desktop currently is GAMING.
Would you prefer Origins on Linux or Steam? Frankly I would prefer neither as both are VERY ANTI COMPETITIVE but Linux needs something and this could be it.
How does Android affect software freedom? (Score:1, Interesting)
Android devices are mostly locked down in ways that are hard to circumvent. Arguably, Android is already quite bad for software freedom.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the point of the BSD licence? Why not just go straight to public domain (for new works)?
Re:And you are why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Has Linux really failed on the desktop?
It's really only been a grass roots movement, without serious backing from a company like Microsoft or Apple (or Google). Expecting a linux-based desktop to just explode without a huge marketing push is ridiculous.
For example, there have been other Linux-based phone operating systems. Non of them got very far until Google started pimping Android and it took over the market in short order.
Lets see Google or some other large company push a nice Linux desktop, say Ubuntu (or Valve ;) ), and see if it fails.
Re:Begging the question (Score:5, Interesting)
Did Google Earth for linux affect software freedom?
How about VMWare Workstation?
Do these products take away our choices?
Do they take away choices from people who don't even use them?
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC BSD license basically says "do what you want, but credit us".
There's also a liability limitation clause and a prohibition on changing the license or removing the copyright notice. The variation in the BSD licenses (there's a few closely related ones) mostly stems from just how much attribution is required; some want rather more than others. The difference rarely gets BSD people very worked up.
The net effect of the BSD license is to disclaim economic rights while maintaining something as close to moral rights as is recognized by US copyright law. You'd word it differently in European copyright law, where moral rights are recognized as as separate concern completely to economic rights (and aren't normally traded).
There's nothing wrong with wanting credit for one's own work. If it's in public domain, however, people can just use it, and I believe it's not illegal to claim the work is yours, though they won't have licensing/ownership rights
If something is truly in the public domain, you can do anything with it. This includes adding text to it that looks like a copyright notice. (I think this wouldn't make your copy of the work be non-PD in itself, as copyright notices in themselves are not a substantive creative element of any work, but I can't be sure. But the placing of the text there, that can be done.) There are also jurisdictions (not in the US) where the only way a work can enter the PD is by having its copyright term expire. PD is way more complicated than BSD (or the GPL variations), even though it sounds like ought to be simpler at first.
That GNU/CRAP is rapidly... (Score:0, Interesting)
...getting more annoying thant iCRAP. *FU* RMS.
Re:And you are why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Canonical is very likely to push it farther than other companies - they actually take care to work with OEMs and make new projects, not just rebrand Gnome or KDE. This actually gives them a face and sets them apart from a crowd. Add to the fact that they are working with Dell in India and China and possibly, again on the Western market soon. There actually are machines distributed with Ubuntu and they are pushing it further.
If there's one thing that's needed, it's marketing now. Advertising the machines, having them suggested to customers in stores (as well as having them in stores), that's the kind of thing that could push Ubuntu to a neccessarily high market share. 10% would be enough to matter to big companies. It won't bring us Office (yes, it's needed by some buisness), but it will make others turn - probably the ones that distribute for Mac as well right now.
Valve might help this - if they do push it and Source engine games end up on Ubuntu, and if they do work with other devs and convince them it is worth it, then we could see the 200 million users by 2014 as Mark Shuttleworth promised.
Are games still "Software" at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cue the trolls... (Score:5, Interesting)
Games & Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
RMS probably somewhat inadvertently made a very interesting remark.
He separates the Game Art from the Game Software...
And admits that Game Art could be "non free"...
One of my current activities is designing Gaming Maths, the way the maths are made has a strong impact on the enjoyment (or lack of) any game.
I would argue that the "artistic" as opposed to "software" component is just as great as the artistic component of the graphics.
I also think that there is a fundamental difference in Gaming apps versus Infrastructure or Activity Apps.
If I provide a text processing system or an OS or an Identity management app, all user data trapped into these applications are naturally "content" owned by the user, and it should be normal for the user to be able to share it just as s/he wants.
And it is immoral to force them to be promoter of their software if they want others to be able to read their presentation, or share files, etc...
But Gaming datas are for the most part relevant only in the game, and although some elements like "avatar design" might be usefully standardized, most parts should not been seen or manipulated outside of the game, because it would destroy the interest and artistic integrity of the game.
Having the "freedom" of adding 10000000 flogotz to my flogotz count is meaning less, and if I really want I could just lie about having found the amulet of yendor...
Reading the source code of a game is interesting, but I do believe that the social contract between a game designer and a tool designer is very different, and not just for the game graphics.
Therefore I think RMS can be assurer that at the end Valve opening to Gnu/Linux is not just neutral but a real gain.
And I think that instead avoiding to speak about it, it would be better to explain that:
There are interesting free games that you can use to play and to learn "how it is done"
There are interesting tools like Ogre3D to help you write games.
And there are non free games, it is somewhat frustrating because it might need something you do not have (if you processor is a MIPS it will probably not run), but it is very different from a non free Tool, and you are welcome to it.
And hopefully game designer will work with the various communities to make sure that the coverage is as global as possible, and not just as "economically optimal"....
Re:Ideology in Technology (Score:5, Interesting)
No one can, will, or should stop Steam from coming to Linux. It will never be put in the repos of mainstream distros, and should not be, but that has little relevance to anything. But even if they can't do much about it, that doesn't mean the people who say there might be downsides are insane zealots. It means they might very well understand why Linux has stuck around for as long as it has better than you do.
Re:And you are why... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't really want Cononical making new projects. They have a history of doing things in ways that are very hard for the rest of the eco-system to adopt. How many Ubuntu projects are available in Gentoo/Arch/Mandriva/Debian?
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cue the trolls... (Score:5, Interesting)
And I have given Gates a bunch of money in the past, and don't have a problem with that. With Windows 8, next time I do buy a new system, I hate to admit it but I'll be forced to buy Apple. After Jobs, Bill Gates looks like a sweetheart to me... but Ballmer has fucked MS right up and W8 is a monkey's abortion. It looks like a stable Unity. But stable shit or unstable shit, they're still shit.
I program on Linux, specifically on a Linux VM guest on a Windows 7 host. Everything else I use Windows. I have had Windows 7 since it came out. Yes I've had to re-install it twice. But I've had to nuke half a dozen or more instances of Linux in the same time. Sure I could have kept them if I wanted to spend hours fucking around when things stopped working, but even with the amount of time it takes, it is easier and faster to blow it away and rebuild.
After the past week rebuilding my dev environment (this time moving it from a physical box where the video kept locking up the interface) I have vowed never use anything but a VM for Linux ever again as it is easier to clone that once it is installed to save the headache of rebuilding.
As much as Linux fanboys like to claim Linux is more stable, well it might just be as a server, but no way for a desktop. This is coming as a former ardent Linux fanboy who got his first Slackware distro in the 90s. Right around now in my life, I just want the fucking thing to work and not have to fuck around with it all the fucking time to keep it that way.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:5, Interesting)
The BSD license only protects software authors from lawyers, while the GPL also protects the software itself from the lawyers as well.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an interesting way of saying "people who would take my work and disregard my goals while distributing it".
No, it's quite clear, when i distribute code under a permissive license that is purely alturistic, do what you will, you don't have to conform to my world view if you don't want to, you're not an 'exploiter'. You only consider them 'exploiters' because they don't have the same world view as you do.
BSD freedoms ARE lossy. There is BSD code in use by Microsoft and Apple that has been extended, closed and made unavailable to the community.
Wrong again, that BSD code is not closed or unavailable.
That sort of makes BSD code long-term unsustainable.
Yes clearly Apache, Webkit, the BSD kernel, etc... aren't sustainable.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:4, Interesting)
GPL is too restrictive.
I'll never understand this argument. You want people to write code that anyone can use and strip away the users rights (that is, take the code, change it, and make it proprietary, so people can't even see the new code, let alone make modifications to it, yet you don't want people to write code that people who modify it and redistribute it have to give back.
If it helps, why not use GPLed code the same way you'd use proprietary software. That is, download it, use it, and pretend that you don't have the right to distribute it at all.
My point is this: If you're okay with a license that's permissive enough to allow people to use it to make proprietary software, then you're probably also fine with proprietary software. If that's the case, what's your problem with a license that gives you more rights than proprietary software? It doesn't make any sense.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:4, Interesting)
See I just have to LMAO at this one, as you DO realize you are using MPAA logic, yes?
No.
As I responded to the other troll over here [slashdot.org], GPL is called Copyleft for a reason, and that's because its explicit purpose is to encourage copying and sharing. It was made necessary by efforts from others, such as theMPAA/RIAA etc to lock up the creative commons and reduce the right of end-users to own and copy their own digital data and tools.
All of this effort to conflate the GPL with restriction is propaganda and doublespeak of the highest order. It's interesting to see you repeating it.
Re:God I hate that use of "free"... (Score:3, Interesting)
But the GPL also hurts the original dev as well.
In my case, for instance, I had built a thriving Linux/Mac program with an active userbase of +1 million users and 150,000 active forum participants. Then a few people forked the GPL'd application and started on an Internet-wide vicious character assault against me and my program while lauding their own fork.
They proceeded to copy all of my code for years while ceaselessly attacking my name everywhere, even non-programming comments. The end result was that all the users of my app left (believing the lies) and went to the competition.
I had no recourse under the GPL. I couldn't create code to set us apart; they'd just copy it. I couldn't mix licenses. And both SourceForge and other places threatened to end my app when i put up explicit licenses prohibiting that one project from leaching my code.
They stripped my copyright from the headers and now you wouldn't even know that the vast majority of code they took was done by my hand. It's sad, man. It was my life work from 2003-2005.
Re:Cue the trolls... (Score:4, Interesting)
$400? Where do you get that number from?
$300 per year is the most expensive offering directly from Red Hat. It's cheaper if you buy from an OEM with 3 or 5 years support.
Also, in this includes an unlimited number of support calls and tickets.
Microsoft charges $195 per web ticket and $245 per phone call, but will usually waive the fee if it turns out to be a genuine bug. If it's just support, they won't.
Apple? For an unlimited amount of incidents, their OS support plan costs - wait for it - $19,995
OK, that's an Enterprise support contract, so it's not a fair comparison, but Apple doesn't offer a real support option for the OS. You can buy AppleCare protection plans for your hardware (which means re-buy if you change hardware) which gives you limited software support, but it doesn't cover opening cases, just basic assistance. And if you need help with, say, how to add a routing exception, it's $695 per incidence.
If you can live with basic Red Hat self-support, comparable to Microsoft's or Apple's AppleCare, you're down to $180 per 1-year RP for Workstation (or $50 if you go for the Desktop Edition, comparable to Windows Home Edition).
No one said that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is free (as in beer), but a rock solid "It just works" desktop OS which the GP claimed wasn't available in Linux? Yeah, it is that.
More so than Windows and MacOS.