• zikzak025@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Just wish it was coming from a non-commercial entity. Puts a sour note on the status of Linux gaming that a for-profit entity is the only one out there making meaningful progress.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Lots of for-profit commercial entities contribute to open source projects.

      The code they’re contributing is covered by the same license as the code contributed by volunteer developers.

      I understand why we should be cautious about these things, but the current situation is that Valve is contributing a lot and their contributions are open source. Yeah, they’re doing it for a profit motive, but not to the point where they’re trying to kill open source projects or hide the updates behind proprietary binaries.

      Valve is, currently, not being evil. GabeN has plenty of yacht money.

      • zikzak025@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Right, but we look at examples like Chromium and we can see where there is still so much potential for things to go sideways. GabeN and his yacht could sink to the bottom of the sea and his estate sells control of Valve to someone less benevolent.

        A commercial entity that has enough control over a project pushes the direction of that project in their favor. And sure you can fork a FOSS project at any time, but once the commercialized version has enough saturation, user inertia and lack of experienced developers to take that initiative often prevents alternatives from achieving success.

    • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      It’s either slave labor or there is SOME form of for profit company is involved somewhere in the chain. Those are basically your two options.

      Even purely free work given willingly in someone’s free time is still supported by proxy of some form of corporate entity. No one lives for free.

      All that matters is the license. If you care any more beyond that your either stupid or dealing with active Nazis. And I don’t see any Nazis in valve so…