Valve Confirms Linux Steam Box Will Be Open Platform

[Nille]

Where did yoy see it?

Technical Documents talk about an Trinity APU. Currently is the xi3 website down so i cant link the informations:/

[Apopas]

Its AMD APU inside, so its either catalyst or opensource.

Where did yoy see it?

[Nille]

Are they allowed to ship the box with the proprietary drivers?

Sure, why not?

[Apopas]

Is it really that hard to accept that we won't be getting anything open sourced from either AMD or Nvidia for the time being? Not everything needs to be open source. And I find the idea of imposing open source no different from the tyrant that you say is closed source.

Intel's drivers are opensource and while for a lot of people Intel's GPUs are fast enough, then the concept of working in a totally open environment is already a reality. Is difficult to see that this is only good?

[entropy]

I doubt that the foss driver will be chosen.

Are they allowed to ship the box with the proprietary drivers?
Isn't it more likely that they ship it with the open drivers and provide a manual installer for the proprietary drivers which
downloads and installs them on behalf of the user? They need at least some kind of "disclaimer", don't they?

[Nille]

Its AMD APU inside, so its either catalyst or opensource.

I doubt that the foss driver will be chosen.

[crazycheese]

Okay, so the bootloader won't be locked so it will be able to install and boot any operating system.

And it will use Linux which is open source. Then with Steam which is proprietary.
How about other parts beside Linux kernel and Steam, will they be open source or proprietary components?

How about the hardware, will it be proprietary? I guess so.
How about documentation?

Will the case use normal screws that anyone can open or special proprietary screws to prevent people from opening the case?

Steam being proprietary is actually a good thing. Yes, its coming from me
The reason is online gaming and hence cheating. If you ever played any online game free or not and seen them, you will understand.
Its hard to track and ban them, it costs time and money. If the whole game and communications are protected by warden/VAC, it is a good thing!
Again, because you can redeem the game outside of Steam, you can play offline or host own server with own responsibility in completely open manner.
But online,.. no,.. its much better to have no cheaters and closed game than even one of them and open game.

The single alternative to this is requirement to pay and register yourself with own personal credentials, so.. if one is caught cheating he is also damaged financially.
But spotting them manually is still time consuming. Its a difficult topic,.. similar to bank authorization,... some things are still better to be closed and obfuscated. Good thing is that they are very rare.

The drivers picked up will be those which HW Valve will choose to put in that minibox and on the date they will choose to do it. And it will also be about CPU choosen.

Its AMD APU inside, so its either catalyst or opensource.
But either way, they are charging money for their console, so they better make sure it is running all features trouble-free.
So, its already a bonus - one of the drivers will get more attention!

[uid313]

Ok so the bootloader wont be locked

Okay, so the bootloader won't be locked so it will be able to install and boot any operating system.

And it will use Linux which is open source. Then with Steam which is proprietary.
How about other parts beside Linux kernel and Steam, will they be open source or proprietary components?

How about the hardware, will it be proprietary? I guess so.
How about documentation?

Will the case use normal screws that anyone can open or special proprietary screws to prevent people from opening the case?

[thofke]

A bit of selective journalism from Michael...

It would have been nice if Michael had also included this interview in this news post:
Valve engineer explains Steambox comments: 'No current plans to announce anything in 2013'

[Ancurio]

What about the graphics drivers? They surely can't ship with the open source versions. Hahaha it's gonna be so amusing hearing all the linux zealots calling valve names that they didn't choose their wonderfully fantastic open source drivers. In linux apparently the only people thinking are the ones that try to make money out of it. I'd love to hear what the open source commies have to say about this.

Who cares what it ships with?