Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.
Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#52Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.
Games are the last vestige of the Windows platform that still chain my students to the platform. If they could game (with the latest and greatest games) on *nix, then, the battle is mostly won, no more dual booting, no more worrying about crappy Windows dev tools.
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#53Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell food?
Free as in speech, not free as in beer, etc. It's not particularly ethical to sell food and refuse to tell anyone what's in the food, which is why we have various laws regarding that. Nor does it seem particularly reasonable to sell someone food under the condition that if they eat it in particular ways, you'll sue them.
Actually, there's another element to growing food you missed: industrial agriculture companies actually have "closed source" seeds. Scientists muck with the genetics of the plant, and one effect is that a farmer can no longer glean seeds for their next crop--they are forced to purchase more from the supplier. Some people may not find that to particularly ethical, either.
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#54This is the closest I've seen them come to recognizing that the importance of free software may vary by where it sits in the stack. Think about it... the full stack of applications is a tree, right? A free root node is much more important than a free leaf node.
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#55Why would I care? I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance. But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but…
Person X is a hypothetical game developer. Person X is not new to software development, but does not have much experience developing games. The best way for Person X to learn is to look at the source code for a game similar to the one he/she wishes to create, to see how the experts did it.
Sadly, that game is non-free, and Person X is unable to study the source code. Person X learns nothing other than that he/she has been denied this knowledge and must go seek it out from another source.
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There's other reasons. What if the game saved all my data to a remote server and I wished to modify the game to save it locally? Or, perhaps the game crashed every time I entered a certain room and I did not want to wait for a fix from the original developers (which may never happen --- what if this game is now unsupported due to its age?).
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#56Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?
I think this is the most important question regarding online games on Linux, and aren't most games online these days?
I think that the solution is radical: I think that as much much time and effort should be put into making the binary unhackable as is put into the game. Ultimately, DRM(1) is a game, and a lot of programmers are addicted to breaking it anyway.
What's funny about DRM in the case of an online game is that it's actually a feature that customers would pay extra for, and a premium for quality DRM. Hopefully, we'll have good companies and groups creating it, and online games (whether given away or sold) will advertise and brag about what kind of DRM that they're using.
(1) I'm using the term DRM because I can't figure out a better term - but it's more like tamper management, isn't it?
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I understand this concept, is it not another consideration that people should receive compensation for their work? In most areas these two goals don't seem to conflict with one another, but in software they seem to, at least a bit, and I don't think I've ever seen something from rms or the fsf addressing this notion. Even if RMS's position is "Freedom is _absolutely_ uncompromisable in any form whatsoever, and…
Whenever rms has been asked this question he has 2 answers. 1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work) and 2) Crowdsourcing The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client) would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the actual end users will not get freedom with the software it…
Wait, how does crowdsourcing make money?
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#58Why would I care? I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance. But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but…
> Why would I care?
You buy a game. It sucks. You wish to sell it, and use the money towards buying another game.
Games are moving towards not allowing this type of sale.
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#59Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?
Technical solutions for social problems are tricky.
Putting stuff server side might help - meaning it doesn't matter so much what client people are using.
Re: Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmers have to eat, and free software needs a supporting paradigm to be sustainable. With Firefox it's the search engine, with Apache it's support, only smaller projects can be made from pure passion. Any large company porting software to a platform will be good, as more people (and thus support) will come to Linux. >Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their use…
Just because you are not doing something directly and obviously "evil" like hitting a baby does not mean something cannot be unethical. As more of our world is software and we rely on it to do things like store our personal information and trust it to respect our privacy etc, how is the availability and ability to understand and inspect that software not a potentially very ethical issue?
Yes you're right. I was trying to frame ethics in its popular definition. I personally love and support open source projects, as they are better from a moral standpoint.
Proprietary software isn't a really bad thing, comparing it to say murder or thievery. If you had to choose between doing the wrong thing (which isn't that bad) and not eating, most people would do the wrong thing.