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Valve Developer Improves The Linux Gaming Experience For Limited vRAM Hardware (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 53 points 7 months ago (9 children)

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.

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Yup, long as it's copyleft (GPL) open source, I don't care if it's microslop paying.

    That said, watch out for a new wave of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) using unmaintainable AI code, and be ready to fork.

    Valve, not so much.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Gabe really is one of the exceptions that not all CEOs are evil bastards.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Nah. No one, not even Gabe Newell, deserves a billion dollars. The very act of having that much wealth when there are still hungry and homeless people is in itself evil.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    I guess. Does he not donate to any charities or anything?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I think the big difference is Valve isn't really in control of many of the projects they're funding, they're mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.

    Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.

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