Valve's Newell Thinks PS3 Needs To Be "Open Like a Mac"

Eraesr writes "Apparently Valve boss Gabe Newell thinks the PS3 needs to be more of an open platform, drawing a comparison to Apple's Mac platform. In an interview with 5BY5.TV, he said he would like to see the PS3 be 'open like a Mac' instead of being 'more closed like a Gamecube.' 'Platform investments, like the Mac, are difficult because you have to be aware of what direction that platform is moving,' Newell said, referring to the firm's recent move onto Macs with its titles and distribution service Steam. 'We need to target platforms that do a better job of looking like where we want to be in a few years.'"

Comments

Yeah

[Monkeedude1212]

Open like a Mac, I get it,

kind of like, Secure like a Windows?

Re:Yeah

[forkazoo]

Open like a Mac, I get it,

kind of like, Secure like a Windows?

You realise that the comparison is against a PS3, right?

Besides, the Mac is a fairly open platform. You can get kernel code and Webkit code under a genuine open source license. Good luck getting Windows NT kernel code and IE rendering engine as open source projects. Apple's developer tools are built around gcc, and the default shell is bash. Apple provides X11 support out of the box, so you can build an app for a Mac, and trivially move it to another platform if you choose to rely only on open standards.

Apple as a company may be psychotic, but I don't know why people insist the Mac is so hilariously closed.

Re:Yeah

[Johann Lau]

No, open like a Mac compared to, say, a Gamecube. None of you going ROFL have actually watched even the first five minutes of the interview, have you? It's boring, it's annoying, but at least it clears up that misconception. None of you (so far, as I'm posting this) are actually discussing the subject of the article, anything he actually says.

Oh, and just to make it clear, I think Mac sucks (1mousebuttonLOLOLOLkthxbai) and Valve is a bunch of greedy, uninspired whores. I'm not defending them, I don't care at all about this.... I just think y'all are tards too, for talking to/about strawmen exclusively. Cheers.

Re:Yeah

[dgatwood]

HFSX is an extension to HFS Plus to allow additional features that are incompatible with HFS Plus.

You are completely misunderstanding that sentence. HFSX is incompatible with HFS+ because a filesystem B-tree sorts its keys in different ways depending on whether it is using case-sensitive or case-insensitive matching. As a result, at a volume format level, HFSX includes low-level changes that are incompatible with ancient tools that work with HFS+ volumes. If we were talking about a disk utility like DiskWarrior (which, incidentally, has supported HFSX since way back before it even became a GUI-selectable formatting option in the non-server version of Mac OS X)---an application that mucks around in the raw volume B-trees by accessing disk blocks directly, then yes, it would break when it encountered these volumes, and break massively. As a general rule, 99.99999% of application developers should not be anywhere near the low-level bits that the technote you referenced refers to.

We're not talking about software that works with the volume format directly here. We're talking about software that opens files by passing hard-coded path names with incorrect case. Such apps also don't work when your home directory is:

• On an NFS mount
• On an AFP volume backed by a UNIX box
• On an HFSX volume
• On a UFS volume (in an older Mac OS X version where this was still supported for writing)

And so on. That incompatibility list is only going to get longer as time moves forward. These days, case insensitive filesystems like HFS+ are the exception, not the rule.

Moreover, Apple has never in any way even HINTED that not working on case-sensitive volumes is an acceptable practive, and even published Technote 2096 that basically says the precise opposite of what you're implying. Because the filesystem underlying iPhone OS is case sensitive, iPhone developers are strongly discouraged from building iPhone applications on case-insensitive HFS+ volumes. On case-insensitive volumes, the simulator can't catch bugs caused by case sensitivity mistakes, so when you finally get the app on an actual device and it fails miserably, you'll be scratching your head.

In short, if your app doesn't work on case-sensitive volumes, now would be a good time to fix it, particularly if you want iPhone developers, web developers, etc. to use your software.

This is like complaining about KDE not compiling properly with a "perfectly sane" configuration of Hurd running on ARM.

No, this is like complaining about KDE running fine on an EXT3 volume, but crashing in bizarre, inexplicable ways when you migrate your system to EXT4. It's a sign that the developer couldn't be bothered to use correct capitalization in hard-coded filenames within their code. The ONLY relevant difference between case-sensitive and non-case-sensitive filesystems in Mac OS X is that if you write code that tries to load "~/Library/application support/whatever" instead of "~/Library/Application Support/Whatever", it will fail on the case-sensitive filesystem. The ONLY bugs it causes are entirely due to sloppy, bad coding on the part of the developer. Thus, software that won't work on HFSX volumes are like a giant shining beacon that screams "We don't know how to write software."

Re:Yeah

[dgatwood]

What, like that obscure filesystem, what's it's name, that no one uses? Oh, right, NTFS.

NTFS, which dates back to the early 1990s, is hardly a modern filesystem. It is also a case-sensitive filesystem under the hood. This is masked by a case-insensitivity shim for applications accessing it through the Win32 API, but applications that use lower-level APIs get case-sensitive behavior. So I'll see your NTFS and raise you basically every single filesystem created in the past two decades.

Case-sensitivity in a filesystem is not something a developer should have to care about, any more than they should have to care about, oh, I don't know, a lack of protected memory. Sure, it would be nice if people used correct cases, but really, it's 2010.

Exactly. It's 2010. If twenty years of every single new filesystem being case-sensitive hasn't gotten people to realize that this is the direction technology is moving, I don't know what will....

Open like a Mac?

[_pi-away]

Sorry, my irony detector is overloading.

Not necessarily ironic

[idontgno]

C'mon. It may be a legitimate comparison on the continuum of platform comparision.

"Sony, you've made the PS3 so closed and restrictive that you make the Mac look like Richard Stallman's promised land."

Re:Not necessarily ironic

[DMUTPeregrine]

That and the Mac is pretty open. Darwin is open, and it's not restricted like an iPod/iPad or such. It's more open in many ways than Windows, though closed in some others (locked to apple hardware).

Re:Well...

[EvanED]

To be fair, the developer tools on the Mac are free, unlike Microsoft's developer tools...

The Express Editions of Visual Studio are pretty darn usable; they're free. While what you said is not technically incorrect, it's also not being entirely honest IMO.

Re:How is a Mac open?

[Wovel]

I am fairly certain I can come up with the source for a lot more of OSX than you could for Windows 7...

Re:How is a Mac open?

[dingen]

Open like a Mac? What does that mean? Its not like Apple is anymore open than MS is

Actually, Apple is a lot more open than MS is.

Re:word association

[Fross]

That's another month for Episode 3.

Thanks a lot buddy! >:|

Mac!=iPhone/iPad

[UnknowingFool]

Judging by the sheer number of responses so far, many people here can't tell the different between iPhone/iPad and Mac. They are both made by Apple. Macs run OS X which is based on BSD. Mac OS X is composed of Darwin sub-system, Aqua GUI, and other libraries. Darwin is open source and is available under a BSD type license. Aqua is proprietary. Mac OS X runs on a lot of open source software such as BIND, bash, openSSH, etc. The Mac versions are available freely at http://www.opensource.apple.com/

The iPhone/iPad uses a variant of OS X. It is not open source and the release of Apps is tightly controlled. Developers are free to release to their own devices but must abide by Apple guidelines if they want to publish in the Apple Store.

Valve is referring to Macs not iPhone/iPad.

Re:How is a Mac open?

[dingen]

It's not just Unix-parts that are open sourced by Apple. There's a lot more.

Re:Well...

[Kwami]

Unless you want to compile native 64-bit binaries. In that case, Visual Studio Express Edition won't be sufficient.

Gabe blowing smoke again

[Gizzmonic]

Remember the horrible Orange Box port for PS3? That was farmed out to EA, but it was still with Valve's approval. It reflected poorly on Valve, and Newell's been in PS3-bashing mode ever since then. Rather than admit that his company is too small to devote the resources to develop on PS3, he blusters about how crappy it is.

  No, Gabe, other developers have been developing on PS3 for years and there are some great games for it. You already develop for Xbox 360, another platform that forces you to have the developer's blessing before you can code. Whining about openness doesn't make sense at this point. Feel free to skip PS3 development. Just don't blame the PS3 for your own company's shortcomings.

I see the Windows fanboi mods are out in force

[Daniel Dvorkin]

There is no possible way that parent post deserves a troll mod, except in Windows-fanboi land. What he says is exactly right: in certain ways -- specifically, code availability, which is exactly the sense in which "open" is most often used on Slashdot -- the Mac is indeed more open than Windows. As another poster points out, hardware-wise Windows is more open, but think about the subject of the story! Sony isn't going to start writing OSs for other companies' game systems any time soon, but more information about the PS3 would help draw developers to the platform. The type of "openness" which Valve is calling on Sony to practice with regards to the PS3 is exactly the type of openness Apple practices with OS X, not that which Microsoft practices with Windows.

Re:You have a strange definition of open

[not-my-real-name]

It's really very simple. Apple is a hardware company that also makes software. Microsoft is a software company that also makes hardware.

Apple doesn't care what software you run on a Mac. Microsoft doesn't care what computer you run Windows on.

Apple wants you to buy a Mac. Microsoft wants you to buy Windows.