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Valve Offers Free Subscription To Debian Developers: Paying It Forward
sfcrazy writes "Valve Software, the makers of Steam OS, is already winning praise from the larger free and open source community – mainly because of their pro-community approach. Now the company is 'giving back' to Debian by offering free subscription to Debian developers. This subscription will offer full access to current and future games produced by Valve. Since Steam OS is based on Debian GNU/Linux it's a nice way for Valve to say 'thank you' to Debian developers."
Not just because this builds rapport with the community, but also because debian developers playing lots of Valve games will be debian developers with lots of firsthand exposure to any bugs or areas that could be improved; and the best work often comes from someone scratching a personal itch. Valve plays the game well (no pun intended).
This is news because it is someone giving free stuff to open source developers!
Solely as a thank you for being developers that helped them succeed.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Because if anything is going to bring users to Linux it'll be games. Games are what tie me to Windows, and I'd be more interested in testing Wine on my existing library if I can get my newest games out of the (proverbial) box on Linux.
Not as much of a threat as Microsoft's exclusive ownership of the PC gaming world.
Please stop talking as if the "FOSS community" was a unified front. I would love to move to a FOSS operating system if I could still play my proprietary games on it. Valve may actually give me a chance.
Games are one of the oldest and most powerful learning systems we have. Computer games obviously lose the physical benefit of RL game,s but they still have mental benefits.
They can teach Logic, promote social skills (as compared to TV), and can be good emotionally just ot blow of some steam.
I understand the drama with debian and non-free games, but surely you can seperate the two concepts.
Thanks for contributing! I've contributed very little code directly to Debian, but it may well be like some open source projects where developers are expected to spend ten times as much time on a feature than it takes to submit a patch.
In Moodle, for example, I added a feature that took about two hours to develop a working patch. Just before submitting the patch, I became an official developer. Seven MONTHS later I was done with that two hour patch. First, I needed to document the proposal for the new feature, then get (documented) community feedback. I had to apply a huge list of style rules to the patch, covering things like variable naming standards, whitespace, etc. Then I needed the component owner to review it. He pointed out that while it complied with the CURRENT standards, it didn't use the newly developed APIs that were chosen for the upcoming release. I recoded it to use the upcoming standards, and some design changes the component owner wanted. This process involved rebasing against master at several times - any time someone else needed to look at it. The new feature required very minor tweaks to some existing classes. Since I had touched those classes, I needed to update those old classes to the new coding standards as well. Then the integrator pointed out I was missing the suites of unit tests, etc.
In all, a two hour patch submission turns out to be 80 hours when you do all of the "official developer" stuff like unit tests and all. So that's one distinction between a developer, who is on the hook for all of that stuff vs. a contributor who graciously submits code.
Please understand I'm in no way devaluing any contributions. For most open source projects, I contribute patches only. I now have a new appreciation for the committed developers who do the grinding work required to have my code integrated into a high quality project.
Ps - a LOT of what I mentioned above are tasks a non-programmer or newbie programmer can help with, if anyone is looking for ways to contribute to projects you enjoy or are interested in.
This is something that personally bugs the shit out of me.....tell me EXACTLY how YOUR freedom is being blocked by having CHOICE in the matter? Nobody is holding a gun to your head, nobody is making you use non free anything, so why should those that want it have to jump through flaming fucking hoops just because it doesn't follow YOUR personal feelings on the subject?
Why is those that are supposedly "for" freedom damned near ALWAYS translate to "free to be like me and do what I like?".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.