Questions For Ryan Gordon, The Linux Game Porter

Tomorrow at Chicago's Flourish conference, Ryan Gordon will be speaking about gaming on Linux. This well known Linux developer also known as "Icculus" has single-handedly ported many games and other applications to Linux and Mac OS X. He is certainly well known within the Linux gaming community with the Unreal Tournament titles among his credits. I'll be talking with him tomorrow and here's some of the questions I'll try to get answered.

It's been nearly six years since last interviewing Ryan on Phoronix so there's many questions to be asked, especially based upon recent events. However, it's not known which questions will be answered. I've contacted Ryan asking him about a Phoronix interview on Saturday and/or to chat over some beers for the great Linux work that he has done. This morning he responded, but simply said to stop by and say hello to him after the talk (he may not be too pleased after all of the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux coverage on Phoronix). Otherwise it's a matter of what questions I can get answered during his Flourish talk.

I'm posting some of the common questions in advance in case any other readers have any other questions to propose.

General questions:

- What has been your favorite game that you have worked on?
- Are you involved at all with the Postal 3 Linux port?
- What are your views on the latest OpenGL 3/4 specifications?
- What would you like Linux gamers and end-users to do in an attempt to further drive Linux gaming?
- Do you see the "Humble Indie Bundle" series as being a long-term viable model for Linux games?
- [In follow-up to his recent open-source GPU driver comments] Should closed-source GPU drivers be enabled by default on major Linux distributions?
- Thoughts on the Unigine Engine?

Questions unlikely to be answered:

- What would you like to say about the Unreal Tournament 3 client for Linux? [We know it's dead, but he's never explained the back-story to it and prefers not to talk about it.]
- What would you like to say about Steam / Source for Linux?
- What projects are you working on going forward?

For fellow (European) beer enthusiasts, should Ryan accept the Phoronix beer offer, I'm thinking of Franziskaner or Julius Echter Hefe-Weissbier Hell (I'm out of Augustiner and there's only one Chicago bar where it can be found, but at a ~10x premium). If no establishments in that area of Flourish can be found serving any Bavarian drinks, it will be on to Chimay and Duvel.

I'll be tweeting notes live from his Linux gaming talk and any of these answers (prior to the Phoronix articles) from @MichaelLarabel on Twitter. It's happening on Saturday at 10:00 CST / 15:00 GMT.