Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns

[Clam]

I personally feel that the community needs to have written consent from the Valve head to port Steam. This would prevent a legal problem from arising. Steam is their property after all. From what I have read, they intend to make it available on other distros. They are more or less breaking the ice right now on a popular platform. Let us not blow this out of proportion. Continue to support their efforts if you ever want to see Linux desktop distros ever become viable gaming platforms. Or else we are stuck with Cash Cow's Windows plus worthless consoles with quickly outdated APIs.

[smitty3268]

/rant

Care to explain how Steam has any more DRM in it than Flash?

[Thaodan]

The issue is not the package it self, the issue is that steam uses ubuntu speficific stuff like jockey, software-properties, update-manager or debian spefic stuff like apt instead using packagekit.
I woud also assume that they are using Ayanta (Unity is a part of it) specific stuff rather than using distro independent stuff.
One thing that is annoying that they're using GTK.

EDIT: They even don't use the Qt/KDE part of the ubuntu specific stuff if running KDE on Ubuntu -.-

[yogi_berra]

What's so damned difficult about pointing your web browser to store.steampowered.com, downloading the client, and then installing?

[cdkrowley]

Pay to play

While I agree that it shouldn't be in the repos till it's out of beta there are free to play games on steam...

[ninez]

...snip...

again you continue to misrepresent my beliefs/positions/etc *over and over* again and going through points that have been covered several times now (or just creating strwamen).... then expect that i should treat you with respect...? ya, right... - if you are going to waste people's time, being a total asshat and you expect them to respect you than you live in a fantasy world... Simply put - G.F.Y. Jimmy.. I never claimed that the licensing issue validated all of my points - you (again) are just making up shit. I never claimed that FOSS vs. proprietary was important to Arch, nor did i claim it was a rule of packaging (nor did i claim it was important to me personally, as cited by my use of lots of proprietary applications). Yet you still continue with these assoholic conclusions, even after we've already kicked over this stuff - you either can't read, are slow or you have brain-damage, dude. take your pick. That list was simply my own observations - that is it. There was no me saying ' this is 100% why' or anything of the sort... I fully-disclosed these were my opinions, based on my own observations (AFAIK - NOT 'what is important to me, personally' - just to set that part straight, since you seem to like to make up shit).

anyway, you are a waste of my time - so i am not going to post a full response - i will say though - i find it funny that you actually think i was 'mad' or having a 'meltdown'. no, dude. ....Just not giving you any respect, cause you are an asshat. I'm sure Archlinux will not be the only distro that has issues with having Valve Steam in their official repos - it may just be for licensing reasons, but i wouldn't be surprised if their were other concerns, particularly the issue of it being a closed-beta... hopefully, Valve will sort out it's licensing and any other issues that come up with linux distributions supporting Valve.

[Jimmy]

I'm a angry name calling kid. My self-righteousness anger and name calling makes me right on the Internet.

Look, son, you oughta calm down a bit before you reply. It's clear that no one can have a reasonable conversation with you when you're mad.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough and didn't agree with you enough to avoid your meltdown.

You came up with a list of criteria that YOU believe should exclude Steam from the Arch Linux repositories. The point I was making is that it is YOUR list of criteria not Arch's.

Being proprietary, for example, is one of the reasons you gave that Arch should not include it in their official repositories. This is YOUR criterion. I understand that YOUR criteria are important to YOU. There's nothing wrong with that. However, hang with me big guy, your criteria doesn't line up with the way packages are currently selected for inclusion in Arch Linux's repositories. This is evidenced by the inclusion of other proprietary packages.

What that means is that your point about proprietary software is not relevant to the discussion about Steam being in the official Arch repositories. Yes, I understand that it's important to you. Perhaps Arch Linux isn't right for you since you place so much value in it.

The same goes for the rest of your list with the exception of the last one. Licensing is typically something they try hard not to violate. The fact that your last criterion overlaps with one of Arch's in no way validates the other items in your list.

I'm not going to go through your list item by item again and explain how each of your criterion is not a criterion of Arch Linux. Your rage probably excludes the possibility of that being effective.

I'm gonna go ahead and bow out of this conversation because I sense it's just going to devolve further into more name calling and cursing. Go ahead and reply if that makes you feel better. But understand that my silence is not meant as a validation of your angry righteousness.

P.S.

Anyway, it doesn't appear to be in the repos anymore (but obviously is available in the AUR - so apparently i am not the only one who thought that it didn't belong in there)

It got removed because of the license (See https://mailman.archlinux.org/piperm...er/024040.html ). Again, that doesn't validate the rest of your list.

Memorable quote: "I would be glad to be able to re-add it once Valve solves these licensing issues."

[Awesomeness]

Steam works on suse
Souce Topic
Installing Steam Linux Beta open suse forum

download media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb
open the .deb with ark
open the data.tar.gz with ark
extract the /lib/steam/bootstraplinux_ubuntu12_32.tar.xz file to any directory where you want, lets say Steam for now
execute ./steam.sh from that directory and let it update

Way too complicated.
Just convert the package to RPM with ?alien? and then doubleclick on the RPM package.

That said, as long as Steam is in closed beta, it does not belong in the official repo of any Linux distribution because you can nothing do with it if you don?t have an approved account.
Without an approved beta account, you'll get kicked right after login.

[Arceliar]

This seems trivial to fix.

Package a script that downloads the ubuntu .deb from valve, extracts the contents, and installs. This is already done for proprietary firmware, fonts, and other software that both forbids redistribution and is freely available from an official source.

[mike4]

LSB

Why does Valve but also Intel etc. not only supply LSB packages alike Google earth!