Valve & Intel Work On Open-Source GPU Drivers

[smitty3268]

I'm really eager to find out Valve's motivation with this project here because it seems so risky from a profit perspective. (11 engineers is a lot of money.) There has to be some kind of console in the plans or something.

One of the mistakes a lot of people on here are making is thinking that Valve is like a normal company. I'm sure they do plan on making money on linux, and are viewing this with a long term strategic goal in mind, but Valve can afford to throw money away on risky propositions like few other companies can. Google or Apple could as well.

Valve is a private company, with no public shareholders clamoring for increasing profits, and only about 400 employees total. They have no debt, and are swimming in money thanks to Steam. The founder of the company is a tech guy rather than marketing or business, so he can certainly swing towards things he thinks are fun or interesting, even if it would be difficult to justify in a normal company.

[johnc]

One of the mistakes a lot of people on here are making is thinking that Valve is like a normal company. I'm sure they do plan on making money on linux, and are viewing this with a long term strategic goal in mind, but Valve can afford to throw money away on risky propositions like few other companies can. Google or Apple could as well.

Valve is a private company, with no public shareholders clamoring for increasing profits, and only about 400 employees total. They have no debt, and are swimming in money thanks to Steam. The founder of the company is a tech guy rather than marketing or business, so he can certainly swing towards things he thinks are fun or interesting, even if it would be difficult to justify in a normal company.

That sounds like a good enough motivation to me.

I'm just curious to know more about the background info / thinking process. I'm nosy.

[Kano]

I was thinking about a Linux steam box already at the beginning. I thought it might be amd (+fglrx) based but maybe even haswell (or later) has got a chance, depending on the speed archived. valve wants to have got competition on that part it seems. This might be available not directly but as a future project. Nobody invests so much money for the few Linux ppl out there right now. There must be somethink like a "master" plan where Linux support is just one part of it.

[johnc]

I also think that there's a bit of an opportunity for a Steam-like marketplace for mobile gaming because wading through the App Store trying to find the coolest games is just weak compared to something like Steam.

[entropy]

I was thinking about a Linux steam box already at the beginning. I thought it might be amd (+fglrx) based but maybe even haswell (or later) has got a chance, depending on the speed archived. valve wants to have got competition on that part it seems. This might be available not directly but as a future project. Nobody invests so much money for the few Linux ppl out there right now. There must be somethink like a "master" plan where Linux support is just one part of it.

Sure, Valve is a company - they're looking for new markets.
And I agree with you, it's hard to believe they "just" target the Linux Desktop users.
It'll be a testing ground for a start.

If there had been any Linux affinity earlier, they'd released ports of there games
long time ago or even released the source of the GoldSrc engine (Half-Life 1).

[jvillain]

They may be thinking about the Asian market. Get in early and own it.

I am as frustrated as every one else with the borked patent system in the US. I am even more afraid that our PM intends to embrace the American patent system with both arms.

As for S3TC. I thought that the patent on that was ruled invalid? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTkxMQ
If not how long until the patent runs out? For those out of the US or those who just don't give a damn about the US patent system there is partial support. http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC

[1c3d0g]

Well all this S3TC mess is Apple's own damn fault to begin with. If they didn't threaten everyone to go nuclear on every silly little thing, HTC wouldn't need to buy S3's patents to protect itself from Apple's legal assault. If there was a way to work it out with HTC, trust me they would've given the Linux community the S3TC patent we so desperately need. Now thanks to Apple's constant bombardment of legal threats against every damn company in existence, all of these companies are holding onto their patents even tighter for fear of being sued to oblivion if they don''t have anything to counter-sue. For every win Apple gets, it makes us Linux users take collateral damage in the form of reduced features, clumsy/awkward/inefficient software implementations and general sub-optimal performance that the programmers have to make on a variety of software products.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

All these things Valve is doing is very exciting.
But it also kinda makes me kinda worried. Despite their enthusiasm, their work on Linux is still considered to be an investment. What if they don't get a lot of returns from this investment? There is no guarantee that people will be flocking to Linux after a few games get ported. What if despite all their work people still cling to windows and the revenue they get from Linux still ends up being too small?
I think if that were to happen, it would really kill game companies' support for Linux.
But I'm just being pessimistic here. Go Valve!

I want to say, there is a lot of people, who play only one game. You know, like HoN, EvE, SC2, D3, WoW, CS, Dota2, L4D2, TF2 etc. There is a lot of Linux users who have partition with Windows or WINE only for one game. If some of this games (like CS, Dota, L4D2, TF2 ) become available for Linux, isn't that great?! It help many people get rid of Windows from their computers, so they will expand Linux-only gamers army.

I can only hope Blizzard will follow Valve.

As for S3TC. I thought that the patent on that was ruled invalid? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=OTkxMQ
If not how long until the patent runs out? For those out of the US or those who just don't give a damn about the US patent system there is partial support. http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/S3TC

S3TC patent is belong to S3 Graphics. HTC own S3 Graphics. HTC is part of Open Invention Network (OIN). So someone need to ask HTC move S3TC patent into this list to make S3TC available for Linux (so distros will be able to provide s3tc package out-of-the-box) or simply allow everyone use it (this make possible include S3TC into Mesa).

The other solution for S3TC problem is S2TC, that is already available in Debian and Ubuntu. When you install psychonauts-bin:i386 from Ubuntu Software Center you will also get libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386 installed. So isn't solution is already here?

[Figueiredo]

According to the information i could get from wikipedia (hanven't read the whole documents myself) these are the patented cases regarding ST3C:

EP1034505 (B1)
JP3978478 (B2)
JP4085116 (B2)
US6658146 (B1)
US6683978 (B1)
US6775417 (B2)
US7039244 (B2)
US7043087 (B2)
US7801363 (B2)

They are still valid acording to the USPTO and EPO (can't read japanese). They expire in 2017-10-02, so in the worst case we are looking at five years for becoming public domain.

[9a3eedi]

I find that unlikely, I mean, imagine how many gamers will switch to Linux full-time after we get high-quality open source drivers that work and perform great, imagine what a great system we'll have once the drivers get improved, more robust, and once we get Wayland and the patent issues go away with Mesa, etc. Imagine once we get commercial games and the latest titles, etc.

It would be so nice to see more companies following Valve's lead with this initiative, I think Linux desktop market share will only grow after this and that's good for Valve and everyone involved.

I don't think they can go wrong with this, but it has to be well executed and we need help from the hardware vendors and everyone too.

I agree that Linux will be much better after drivers get improved and things like that.. and I'm pretty sure the Linux community will grow greatly from this.. There's probably a lot of developers who will actually start caring about Linux now. But Linux has more issues than just a few driver problems. Commercial support isn't there yet, and even if Valve ported their entire library to Linux, it'll take more than that to switch gamers to Linux. People also want games from other companies, like Gearbox, EA, Bethesda, etc... those companies don't even have their games ported to Mac yet, of all things.

And that's just games. Software-wise, people would also want to run MS Office (LibreOffice just won't cut it for a lot of people) and all their favorite windows programs.

I want to say, there is a lot of people, who play only one game. You know, like HoN, EvE, SC2, D3, WoW, CS, Dota2, L4D2, TF2 etc. There is a lot of Linux users who have partition with Windows or WINE only for one game. If some of this games (like CS, Dota, L4D2, TF2 ) become available for Linux, isn't that great?! It help many people get rid of Windows from their computers, so they will expand Linux-only gamers army.

I can only hope Blizzard will follow Valve.

Good point. Reminds me of a lot of other comments I've read in here.. how Valve should've ported TF2 because that's probably their most popular game, and many people just play that.