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

[andyprough]

This is a braindead take tbh.

Talk about braindead - you didn't even read the comment you are responding to. He's questioning if we should throw around the word "wonderful", when a company that promulgates locked-down game software did nothing more than we should expect of any profit-making company by sharing their improvements to the free software graphics stack that they use in order to make money. It's not "wonderful" to do what's expected and even required of you under the terms of the licenses.

It's good that the libre-licensed graphics stack available to GNU/Linux distros has advanced to be more useful in recent years, and it's "good" that Valve shared their contributions [but also "expected" and "required"]. But we already know that they put in that time and effort so that they could have their own hardware/software ecosystem that they control, where access to proprietary games is purchased within a locked down environment. Nothing "wonderful" about Valve's motivation for making those contributions.

[verude]

It's not "wonderful" to do what's expected and even required of you under the terms of the licenses.

mesa is MIT licensed, so valve isn't required to make their changes public, when it comes to kernel changes, the license doesn't force them to go through the process of upstreaming, just making it available would be enough, which is why a bunch of devices, like wifi adapters have drivers available but they don't come with the kernel. Valve also has software like gamescope and fossilize that they decided to make open source, so to say they've only done what's required of them is simply wrong.

[user1]

Talk about braindead - you didn't even read the comment you are responding to. He's questioning if we should throw around the word "wonderful", when a company that promulgates locked-down game software did nothing more than we should expect of any profit-making company by sharing their improvements to the free software graphics stack that they use in order to make money. It's not "wonderful" to do what's expected and even required of you under the terms of the licenses.

Yes I've read it. But I was talking specifically about his comparison of Valve to Microsoft which IS utterly braindead. And yes, Valve's contributions are without any doubt "wonderful".

You know, Valve could've done way way less when it started investing in Linux since 2012. Instead of improving Mesa drivers, it could've simply put its bet just on proprietary drivers to do all of the optimisations and instead of improving upstream Wine and creating Proton, it could've just made its own proprietary solution. Tbh, I see nothing but entitlement in both of your comments. You both deflect the enormous amount of open source contribution Valve has done all these years in different areas. Contributions that benefit everyone, not just Steam users and an amount that no other profit-making company has ever done. You still don't seem to realise that.

Basically, what you demand from Valve, is the same as demanding any proprietary software vendor to open source their stuff. You may live in your free software utopia bubble, but the world doesn't work this way. You may think I'm a proprietary software shill, but I'm just being realistic. And I say this as someone who of all software types actually wants to see more free and open source games and game engines the most.

[user1]

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.

You can praise DRM free stores, but how much technological contributions have they all done to the Linux desktop? Zero. See, that's why Valve gets all the praise and that's exactly why its contributions are called "wonderful", so it absolutely doesn't lose its meaning. And these DRM free stores can't do such contributions exactly because they don't have the resources that Valve has and they only have a fraction of the budget. Others like GOG.com don't even have proper Linux support.

[pattakosn]

M$ too.

With wsl you can learn the basic commands and interactions. And Microsoft is one of the largest sponsors of Linux - it has a platinum membership in the Linux Foundation.

Microsot also does not block games from its studios from running on Linux, and could if it were a bad company.

as much as i understand what you are saying, it is difficult to not bring up on word here "DX9" .
Yeah, old stories

[geerge]

Microsoft has enriched Linux and brought many amazing technologies to Linux!
They gave us VS Code, .NET, ASP.NET Core, EF Core, PowerShell, Edge, etc.
Microsoft also have their own Linux distributions that they use in the cloud, and they contributed Hyper-V support to the Linux kernel. They probably contributed to Mesa, Wayland and X.Org Window System too with all their work around WSLg.

Funny, most of the first examples I would use as a point against MS, examples of NIH, tools they've used as weapons against FOSS and others to try and carve out their own little garden, general pains in the arse. Bloody .NET man I tell you, I know I'm in the minority even among Linux folk in saying this, but that is one bucket of crap I would blink out of existence if I could.

[Anux]

So all devs work for free? No wonder Red Hat is firing people from their team, can't have people work for free.

The Red Hat devs get paid by ... wait for it ... Red Hat, not by MS and not by the Linuxfoundation.
The Foundation pays for servers and kernel maintainers which is needed (and I bet some stupid diversity program is a must have these days) but MS joining the foundation did not result in them hiring new developers. If MS had instead used the money to pay some kernel devs, than it would have advanced the kernel development.

[evasb]

Valve is wonderful because it actually is contributing to Linux as a user-facing platform (and succeeding at it), Microshaft is just another one that just see Linux as a server OS.