Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community

[rmfx]

Coincidentally, it's when companies are not rotten with IPOs and stockholders that they are not toxic.
It's not Unity that would do that...

[timofonic]

If you think Linux Foundation is stupid and irresponsible with the donations it receives, you have bigger problems as a community than MICROSOFT BAD, REEEEEE.

Please prove the contrary instead pure sectarian blaming. I see Linux Foundation WASTES lots of money.

[Mike Frett]

It's sad to see people thinking Microsoft is a friend to Linux. Microsoft has proved over and over again their goal of destroying competition. Direct X was an attempt to kill gaming on other devices by locking games to Windows instead of OpenGL. IE was an attempt to kill off other browsers. Microsoft's mouth opens wide, how long before they swallow the Penguin? Open your eyes.

[Eirikr1848]

In the new “corporate-driven open source ecosystem” — Valve is doing things RIGHT.

Before my Steam Deck I spent maybe $20-40/year on games. Now? I spend about $100-200 during each of their event sales.

And the beauty is I can play some of these games on my Athlon 3050U 2x CU Vega 14nm, My Kabini E2-3800 2x CU GFX 703 GPU, all the way through my more modern desktop setups.

So yeah. The benefits they have brought are immense.

[HEL88]

It's sad to see people thinking Microsoft is a friend to Linux. Microsoft has proved over and over again their goal of destroying competition. Direct X was an attempt to kill gaming on other devices by locking games to Windows instead of OpenGL. IE was an attempt to kill off other browsers. Microsoft's mouth opens wide, how long before they swallow the Penguin? Open your eyes.

You write about ancient history from 25 years ago. But OK.

Direct X was an attempt to kill

DirectX when it appeared it was framework for developing games that consists of:

DirectDraw (raster graphics library) ,
Direct2D (2D vector graphics),
Direct3D,
DirectWrite (text render library),
DirectInput (a library for using the mouse, keyboard, joysticks and gamepads),
DirectPlay (network support in games),
DirectSound (sound, effects, dsp support),
DirectMusic,
DirectShow (suport for video),
DirectSetup (management of component installation and deinstallation)

And are you surprised that developers used DirectX? A convenient, uniform, comprehensive library supporting game creation. There is no conspiracy, no killing, but M$ simply provided the developers with what they needed.

Open your eyes.

IE was

Before IE, you had to pay for the browser. In 1995, Netscape Navigator cost $79, which is $160 today.

Microsoft gave people the browser for free with the price of the system.

Microsoft destroyed companies just as much as open source does today. Freeness always hurts those who make them pay for products.

What happened to Aix, HP-UX, Solaris etc.???? Linux destroyed these systems. Open your eyes.

[Dukenukemx]

You know who isn't like Valve? Apple who took DXVK and Wine and then modified it for their toolkit and gave it a license which doesn't require them to release the source code.

[PublicNuisance]

Valve runs a closed source client in Steam that allows the most invasive DRM programs out there onto it's platform. They also haven't made their games or game engines FOSS. These are facts that can't be contested. You can try to explain them away or reduce their degree of seriosuness if you wish but that doesn't make them untrue. My point in all of this is how far has the FOSS community fallen when a company that does the above is considered " A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community" ? They are no different to me than Microsoft is. Microsoft also makes a bunch of closed source software but every now and again makes something FOSS so they can be praised for it. I don't hate Valve but I do hate the praise they get considering they could do so much more and have the resources to do so. I would rather praise Itch.io which has a FOSS client for their store and try to focus on having DRM free games, doing all the above with a fraction of the budget Valve has. There are countless FOSS game engines we could praise instead of prasing the people who make the closed source Source engines so lets do that instead. If Valve is "wonderful" then what do we call those projects that make 100% of their work FOSS ? Words like "wonderful" lose their meaning when we just throw them around carelessly.

[unic0rn]

Please prove the contrary instead pure sectarian blaming. I see Linux Foundation WASTES lots of money.

"Sectarian blaming" is the exact attitude of this community towards Microsoft.

Is Microsoft retarded? Sometimes it still is, yes, but much less so than a decade or two ago. Is it hostile towards Linux? I wouldn't say so. Linux isn't even a competition for them, they've pulled their heads out of their asses and learned to cooperate.

Something this community should learn to do as well, instead of acting like a religious cult.

[user1]

My point in all of this is how far has the FOSS community fallen when a company that does the above is considered " A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community" ? They are no different to me than Microsoft is. Microsoft also makes a bunch of closed source software but every now and again makes something FOSS so they can be praised for it.

This is a braindead take tbh. Seems like you have absolutely no clue how much did Valve contribute to and improve open source GPU drivers and the Linux graphics stack in general, from 2013 to this day. During all these years, Valve has played a huge role in making Mesa drivers relevant for gaming (before 2013 they were pretty much unusable for anything graphically demanding). And btw, many seem to not realise this, but without Valve investing in Linux since 2012, the only option for high performance graphics on Linux would've been the awful proprietary blobs by Nvidia and AMD that give you stuttery and buggy experience in most hardware accelerated desktop environments. AFAIR, Valve is the one who initiated these Mesa driver optimisations in 2013. The difference between Microsoft and Valve is that Microsoft does everything for its own benefit, while thanks to Valves upstream contributions, many other people can benefit from them. You don't even have to use Steam for that. Compared to that, what contributions has Microsoft done to Mesa drivers? Well, mainly those for its own benefit (WSL). And the same in other areas as well. During the last few years it does seem Microsoft has released more of its software for Linux, but that's not the same as technologically improving some aspects of the Linux desktop, which is exactly what Valve does.

[verude]

You write about ancient history from 25 years ago. But OK.

The problem is that the "ancient history" gives them benefit to this day, the shady stuff they pulled then allowed them to gain market dominance.

When it comes to IE, there would be no problem if its sin was just being "free", the problem is the garbage activex they pushed to keep the competition out (and there are more examples of this), funnily enough I recently had to deal with an ancient dvr and I couldn't access its web interface because it relies on activex. Also, microsoft tried to shaft the spyglass, the company they licensed IE from, because a part of the license the deal was they'd get part of the revenue as payment, and then they went and made it free, so they had to take it to court.

You have microsoft funding SCO during their litigation phase against linux. You had microsoft throwing accusations that linux supposedly violated hundreds of their patents and threatening to sue companies like red hat.

When it comes to their own hardware, at least in the consumer space, they also don't seem to care about linux users. Have an xbox controller and need to update the firmware? you need windows for that. Want to use a microsoft surface laptop on linux? have fun rolling your sleeves because it won't work properly out of the box.