The FSF Has Certified A USB To Parallel Printer Cable For Respecting Your Freedom

[Bsdisbetter]

For the desktop market share, in the past 30 years the dominant factors were
- office suite
- games
- backwards compatibility

Today, the game is mostly over, market positions have been established, and Microsoft is keeping their OS marketshare high by preinstalling it on laptops through their usual shady business practices.

I wonder why doesn't EU sue them for billions of damages.

But to get back to the issue, games are still somewhat important today for desktop experience.

"office suite" - only ever important for corporate/business clients. Apple had WYSIWYG MS Word before PC. Apple was more expensive. Apple had a better graphics library in the toolbox or even later with Cocoa, but still loses out to Windows directxNN - why? Cost.

Even now, linux has a great office suite, but it has only niche gaming. Why? Poor graphics drivers? Lack of support for gaming input devices? I don't know. It's been many years since I worked for a game developer and back then it was all of the above plus a small market, no single purchase point, no willingness to purchase etc etc etc. Maybe steam et al will change that, I doubt it. Niche.

[Chugworth]

Nope. Free Software isn't about "easy manipulation" just for the sake of easy manipulation. Software is just a set of instructions that cause your device to do things it instructs it to do. With non-free software, you give up the control over your computer does - and that's what FSF is against, with their set of four freedoms being designed to fight against. FSF, or even Stallman, aren't against copyright for art at all, because music or graphics aren't even remotely software-like in their purpose.

Audio files and video files are sets of instructions as well. Sure they're limited in what they can do, but modern operating systems put safeguards in place that limit what applications can do with the computer hardware. From your explanation, it sounds to me like the creative works of software developers are being put at a disadvantage compared to the creative works of music composers and graphics designers. We can see how well they accept that.

[GreenReaper]

Even now, linux has a great office suite, but it has only niche gaming. Why? Poor graphics drivers? Lack of support for gaming input devices? I don't know. It's been many years since I worked for a game developer and back then it was all of the above plus a small market, no single purchase point, no willingness to purchase etc etc etc. Maybe steam et al will change that, I doubt it. Niche.

Well, you have to get away from the idea of selling a game as a product. Instead you're selling the *creation* of a game. For free software the unit cost is driven towards zero. You might be able to provide a service of "adding specific features to this product", and that includes games.

There's another issue, which is that games are very similar to bespoke products. That's why you see office software getting a lot of work - they have collective value, and you're just polishing it. But many games have, historically, been version 1.0 products, and where they were not they still often contained an awful lot of new content.

It can be hard to build on that to create something as appealing to people six months down the line. After all, you played that game already. And if most of the audience for the game has moved on, who will dedicate themselves to polishing it?