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Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns
New submitter skade88 writes "With the Linux Steam beta giving Ubuntu and its large userbase all the love, other Linux gamers understandably want to be let in on the fun. For the beta, Valve has provided Steam as a Debian package. Many hungry Linux gamers have reported that they have Steam running on their favorite distro, but that still leaves the legal debate. What is the legal threshold needed to get Steam in the repos of your preferred flavor of Linux? Will Valve's one-size-fits-every-OS license be flexible to work on Linux or will it delay the dream of a viable gaming world for Linux? We are so close to bridging the last major hurdle in finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop: Gaming. Lets hope the FOSS community and Valve can play together so we all win."
The packaging is not the issue here.
Any competent distro can install Debian packages via various foreign package tools.
The issue is that some of these Distros are going out of their way to accommodate a non GPL package, and a beta one at that.
Its a binary blob.
Any time a Distro starts messing with those, its on very thin ice. Most don't. They just write scripts that will fetch the original and
do what ever is necessary to install it if the user chooses. Or they seek official permission to re-package. This is very common with Video drivers, etc.
The proper way is to fetch the binary from what ever legal source Valve provides, and install it using what ever foreign package utilities they have.
That way they live within valve's license. Its the only reasonable way. Why take on a packaging headache for a binary blob?
Part of what was troubling from Valve's Steam license comes down to "You may not, in whole or in part: copy, hotocopy, reproduce, translate, reverse engineer (with the exception of specific circumstances where such act is permitted by law), derive source code, modify, disassemble, decompile, or create derivative works based on the Program; remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Program; or attempt in any manner to circumvent any security measures designed to control access to the Program."
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Seriously, this is not an issue.
Valve wants to make it easy? Run a repo, and provide instructions for using it.
Valve wants to make it only moderately difficult for newbies? Provide package files and leave it at that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Nothing to see here , moving on ...
AccountKiller
The answer is easy, and I think it applies to all distributions:
To be in the distribution, the licence of your project must fit the , currently version 1.9 or later. This means that the licence most likely also has OSI approval and can be found on the SPDX list. Beyond that, you also need to make sure that your package is compatible licence wide with the licences of all your dependencies.
To be available for a distribution, you only need to take care of the latter bit, and you can choose any licence, including non-FLOSS commercial ones. I, however, will not look at, review, debug or build that package without being paid for it outside of the scope of my work on the distribution.
I am a packager for a major GNU/Linux distribution.
The Steam client auto-updates on Windows. I would imagine it would do the same on Linux. Now, I understand that Windows doesn't have a packaging system like Linux but I really don't see why Valve would need to use one. There are several pieces of software that I use that I get from a tar.gz over a rpm or a deb. Why wouldn't Steam do the same?
Games and video editing are the only reasons I keep a Windows PC around. And a lot of my Steam games already run under Wine.
Eh? Why not all of the above. A lot of companies provide RPM and DEB archives, plus a .tar.gz
It's not particularly hard to package things up.
If they want to add some ease-of-use to updating, throwing the packages on a public repository would work, but I believe that the application itself was supposed to have self-updating capabilities.
Games and video editing are the only reasons I keep a Windows PC around. And a lot of my Steam games already run under Wine.
Audio stuff too.
My kingdom for a good Linux ASIO driver...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yeah, because I definitely want to be giving every random software company root access to my system.
She was not getting any updates either. Which I bet is the problem he was trying to solve.
It happens every so often around here that someone will claim X as the final hurdle to "finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop", and if you think that packaging Steam is that last cab off the rank, you are sorely mistaken. What about the ruination of a good desktop environment (GNOME), and the torture that getting a video card properly working can be? Or the cacophony of sound libraries that mean I can't get Skype to pick up my microphone? Or the many mail programs that *should* be able to import/export each other's databases yet, to this day, still manage to be a PITA (Kontact!).
I've been using Linux full time for 5 years (since the Windows Vista calamity) and it wasn't until Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one (Debian Squeeze and now openSUSE due to a new mobo install, and to get support for the LAN on same I wasn't prepared to upgrade to Sid). openSUSE 12.2 hasn't turned out to be as stable as I had hoped, so my Mac Mini should be delivered on Monday (TNT tracking currently has it in transit from Hong Kong :-) And installing and configuring Oracle Java is a nightmare. Just when you think you've found the right HOWTO to get it installed, you find that there's another way, and the way you were using was perhaps ill-advised. Yes, this isn't Linux's fault but Java is a necessity for some people, and the free Java doesn't quite cut it for some apps (CrashPlan, for example). It used to be that there were non-free repos in Ubuntu that added all these things nicely, but these seem to be a thing of the past nowadays for most distros.
Until Linux learns to cope with the installation/addition of other software that doesn't live up to its high and mighty standards, and stops fragmenting its core GUIs and programs, the much prophesied "year of Linux on the desktop" is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN! And if you think that people are going to accept a totally stripped-bare 100% pure distro the likes of which Richard Stallman would use, then it's game over (though it's probably been game over for years, now).
Seriously. Why do distros have to ship with every possible FOSS package under the sun? Why not let the user decide which packages to install after they get the base system installed?
A word processor is not necessary to make a working system, yet every bloody one of them ships with Open Office as part of the default install, which then costs time in removing it. If I want a word processor, I'll install it later.
Same thing with Steam. It's awesome that Valve is doing this, but at the same time, it's not necessary to a working system and the people that are actually interested in playing Valve-distributed games will make the necessary investment in downloading the installer as a separate package. There is no need to include Steam on any distro.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Linux Mint comes with Dropbox. And that is a good thing.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
The license says you can't redistribute it without permission. Valve will likely give permission to any distribution worth mentioning. Metadistributions won't be permitted to redistribute without permission, but they can simply link to the original distribution's repo and/or packages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ok, you prefer that the spyware comes in an unverifiable binary proxied by your distro's servers. I just don't understand what is the difference (except for who pays the bandwidth bill).
If you don't want Valve to have access to your system, don't install Steam. Or that is too simple?
Rethinking email
Steam isn't gaming anyway. Steam is a game distribution service, in linux world it's basically a gaming specialized repository, that takes money. Every developer under the sun still needs to package their games, although the point of steam is probably that valve will handle that for you I imagine a lot of teething pains.
Valve is only going this route to hedge their bets against windows 8, justifiably so, and that's the big opportunity for linux and always has been: waiting for a serious break in microsofts armour. If windows 8 is the trainwreck it seems like it could be, well we might have 2013 as the actual year of the linux desktop and game companies coming along for the ride.
The Source engine from steam, which is used for some games, being on linux matters a bit, but one game engine does not an industry make. I'll be very interested to see if the big guys in the business add in linux support while they're at it (PS4, Xbox3, Windows PC already, why not add Mac and Linux for the same reason valve is?). With kickstarter funding a few engines in the direction of linux there might be some future hope for games, rather than just a store that can be run as a webpage.
OK, here's the news:
1. Nobody really uses SUSE anymore. Even Slackware beats the pants off it for usability. Give SUSE the heave-ho and you're halfway to paradise. *
2. Java is 100% unnecessary for most of the productive tasks for which you will use a computer. Just bin it. If anything you think you want to run requires java, bin that too and just use a non-java equivalent. Java is very useful for mobile phones and old-style web apps, but nothing on the desktop since 2004.
3. This is the choir here. Nobody in this audience really cares whether 2012 is the year of the Linux desktop or not. The linux desktop is great: we know that and we use it. Whether everybody else uses it or not is largely irrelevant to us.
4. GNOME 3 sucks - this is widely established. The good news is that you run Linux, so you have your choice of XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, AfterStep, Ratpoison, Fluxbox, etc. Just run whichever window manager you want.
5. If your MUA won't export to mbox and/or maildir, why are you using it? Question 1 for any data-critical apps is always "How do I get my data out of it?". If an app cannot answer that, don't use it.
*OK, that one may be slightly contentious, but TBH, I've never (and I mean in since kernel 1.0) heard any convincing argument regarding why anyone should run SUSE over another distro. Counter-arguments happily invited.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
"So sure, you can install $PACKAGE yourself, but first you're going to have to track down the three libraries it uses, and the two libraries one of those use, and the three libraries one of those use. (Believe me, I do this a fair bit because I somewhat frequently have need to install things to non-standard locations.)"
Believe me, I've installed "official" versions of Firefox and Opera in any directory accessible to my non-root user account. They typically come in a tarball of program binaries rather than the usual open source code. A third-party binary tarball or installer intended for GNU/Linux will sensibly include any unusual libraries needed by the program.
You can visit the MegaGlest RTS project page for an example of a GNU/Linux installer that can be run from a non-root account (http://megaglest.org/download.html). The installer is itself binary that you must bless with the proper executable permissions.
So Linux binary tarballs and installers aren't as uncommon as you think, at least when it comes to cross-platform projects that have fairly frequent official releases.
and now she no longer had to pay for her operating system either.
Doesn't sound like she paid for her OS in the first place, now does it, having received it as a donation and all?
A lot of things about this post seems very off. I wouldn't doubt if it was pure bullshit.
You managed to summarise his points quite well... Not too sure about the last one, though... but it was a funny read :-)
Arch Linux is awesome. Steam will work find as I can tell your running HLDS and SRCDS on Arch works great, and there updating tools work great. You dont' even have to fiddle with pacman or AUR to get it to work,
I don't generally like to comment in threads like this, but I have to hand it to you for translating the previous commentator's comments to what he actually means.
Not really bringing gaming to Linux as it's more or less emulated, FGS fix Linux!
Emulated? You realize that the whole point with making a native Steam-client is exactly that the devs would start releasing native games?
>Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one
This is silly, because in the Ubuntu repos, there are a couple of dozen window managers and all the standard DEs. And Unity itself is just a Compiz plugin. You can just go into ccsm and turn it off.
Changing distro because you don't like the default window manager or DE (if you did a dist-upgrade, you'd have kept your own settings) you're doing Linux the wrong way.
>rest of message
I dunno man, I've been doing this stuff since 1994, and Ubuntu has been stupidly easy to set up and change around to my liking. Ubuntu doesn't look or act at all like default over here.
--
BMO
Is this another one of those for-sale-low-/.-UID accounts? Sometimes I wish I had weaker memory.
(a) Only old people used GNOME. XFCE or LXDE for the easy wins, plus openbox, e, or even KDE if you're a glutton for punishment. Plus, others for the asking.
(b) X has become so good that a configuration file is simply not needed for a single-monitor user. I've only encountered one machine in the past 4 years where X didn't work, and that was for a video card/mobo combination that wouldn't even display console (a pizzabox PowerPC (Damn you, Apple!)).
(c) Skype can't figure out the mike, yet audacity does, and audacity isn't written specifically for linux. I'd be pinning the blame closer to skype than the libraries.
(d) Now you're just making shit up. Kaddressbook (Kontact is merely a front-end for a set of programs) imports/exports in CSV, vCard, LDIF, and a couple other formats I've never heard of before looking into this.
At which point, I give up. I bet you feel validated as a troll because I wasted 30 second researching and a moment or two typing. At least it was a canonical troll, false notions presented in a plausible manner, rather than flamebait, designed to incite emotional reaction.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Fine then either don't run it or put it in a Linux container.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
they also don't get the source code to VMWare Player, Adobe Flash Player, or any of a dozen other common linux apps
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I had no idea people cared about the UID of their /. accounts, but I've been here for a very, very, long time. I'm not going to invest the time and energy refuting all of your points, but suffice it to say, I've reached the limits of what tinkering with my OS can teach me. I'm all about "getting things done" now and if I have to read a lengthy HOWTO to achieve something that "just works" somewhere else, sorry, but the "just works" is going to win. I hope that Linux does get to the point where it can claim >= 10% desktop market share, but as long as its as fragmented as it is, that day will never come. Oh, and happy to have wasted your time :-)
...about the "year of Linux desktop" never happening because it that has already happened, if you look at things from different perspectives.
There is a case to be made that this past year, 2012, is the "year of Linux on the desktop" in a sense. When you factor in mobile devices, in this past quarter, Android computing devices shipped in higher numbers than Windows computing devices (NT-kernel based and otherwise) INCLUDING THE TRADITIONAL PC. So, when you set your phone or tablet on a desk at least, Linux has finally triumphed. One thing is for sure--if it isn't the year of the Linux DESKTOP it is certainly the year of Linux PERSONAL COMPUTING.
Some might say the desktop was conquered by Linux much earlier. When a user sits at a desktop how long is it before that user opens a browser and uses Google to search or Facebook to, well, waste time I guess. Sure, most of those desktops booted into Windows by a large measure, but it was a mere shell--a runtime container for the web app that is Google or Facebook, and both would not be possible without Linux. So at a differnt level, Linux is already master of the desktop.
Still think that the above arguments are valid, and think that a Linux Desktop is nothing less than a full sized PC on a desk that boots into a Linux OS and hndles the full software stack? Well then maybe that is a cause not worth fighting for. Something is pretty evident here: It would be wrong for Linux advocates to dwell excessively on "the desktop". Though "the desktop" will never disappear completely it is clearly a mature, stagnant segment of the global computing ecosystem that is only going to become less dominant over time. As such, conquering the desktop is not the path to conquering the computing world. It might be important to you, but you are not a normal computer user. Indeed, very few slashdotters are. I am certainly not a normal computer user that is for sure. Your comments very much reveal that"
I've been using Linux full time for 5 years (since the Windows Vista calamity) and it wasn't until Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one
To me it looks like you are a "power user"--comfortable with computers enough but don't cope well with change. My guess is that you were satisfied with WinXP but circumstances forced you onto Vista (your old PC was too outdated to run the more contemporary bloatware, or broke down, etc and you needed a new machine, and they all came with Vista by then). There was definitely a time for many where it was acually easier to obtain and install Linux than get a legal downgrade to XP so you were motivated to go to Ubuntu. Then Ubunti changed (or got "ruined" for you), and so you picked the most conservative one out there--Debian--in an effort to resist change. But you don't have the stomach to use any "unstable" packages to support more recent hardware so you went to the next mode conservative community distro. I do see the pattern here.
There are distros and desktops out there for you. You could go back to Debian--I would suggest "testing" though (don't be scared of the name--by Debian's standards "testing" is more stable than an LTS release of Ubuntu). I can already tell you would NOT like GNOME 3--even if it was brilliant it is too different from that win95 era design pattern for you--so be sure to use XFCE and you will be right at home. Apart from that Linux Mint is another good OS--and Cinnamon or MATE are old-school enough in their design to work for the "traditionalists" among us. I like them anyways...
The puzzling thing is that you spout off all these old problems--can't get metworking going, cant get sound going, can't get video going blah blah. These are not the challenged they were 5 years ago, and even 5 years ago they were not such huge problems aside from wireless and bleeding-edge video chipsets. These days it isn't a challenge to find Linux-friendly ha
*OK, that one may be slightly contentious, but TBH, I've never (and I mean in since kernel 1.0) heard any convincing argument regarding why anyone should run SUSE over another distro. Counter-arguments happily invited.
The best reason to use SUSE (which is also the best reason not to use SUSE) is YaST. It's one of the best configuration tools for new users (iirc only Mandrake/Mandriva had something comparable) but it can lead to horrible breakage if you mix using YaST and manually editing configuration files.
SUSE also used to provide (imho) the best out of the box KDE desktop experience but with the switch to Gnome they let that strength fall by the side entirely...
SUSE also came with very decent manuals (a user guide and an administration guide which rivaled many Linux books in size & scope) but the sale of boxed sets has been scrapped with SUSE Linux 11 as far as I remember (at that point Novell decided to adopt the RH model and only to provide an enterprise distribution). In the German language area it also was the distribution for which 3rd party documentation was the most readily available (e.g. Michael Kofler's excellent "Linux" book used to be quite SUSE centric and even included SUSE Linux evaluation versions at times).
From my point of view SuSE peaked around version 7 where it provided massive advantages over contemporary distributions for non-experts. Today there is very little reason for a home user to use OpenSUSE and SUSE mostly competes with RHEL.
All I need is a game-centric distro (Valvux?) and Adobe to jump in with CS6 for the platform, and I am all set for work and play. I would love for them to eventually render iSores and M$ screensmudgers 8 useless to my demographic.
If windows 8 is the trainwreck it seems like it could be, well we might have 2013 as the actual year of the linux desktop and game companies coming along for the ride.
I doubt this. 2013 will not be the year of the Linux desktop. The only reason for gamers to update their OS to a new release is if the current version will not support the hardware they're putting in their machine. Gaming companies aren't going piss off their customers and require them to move to a Linux OS just to play their game so developer support is going to continue for Windows 7 for quite some time. I'd say that reasonably one could assume 2015 or 2016 for the year of the Linux desktop assuming Windows 8 flops very badly. Even then, Windows 7 enjoys extended support until 2020.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I want gaming on Linux to work, not be releated to failure because a few pundits get all twisted up over the license. We have not-free drivers and free-as-in-beer software. Even the GPL license has fallen off in popularity over BSD and Apahce licenses. If Valve makes gaming on Linux work AND brings hadrware vendors into the Linux fold, it will be worth it. Free software has its place. Free tools made Linux possible. Free tools enabled Apple's app explosion. If it works, few will care or look at the end user agreement unless it hinders product use.
Bring it on Valve! More power to ya!
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Someone paid for it, how many windows licences do we all own that we didn't ask for?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.