Slashdot Mirror
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."
and now nothing will get done.
This is obviously effort to thwart Debian.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
Q: Why did Debian development stop?
A: The entire development team was given dozens of free video games.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Debian unstable is the rolling release. Debian testing is a slightly more conservative rolling release, with updates screened mostly automatically. Stable is for people who want a manually "release-managed" approach with multi-year support lifetime.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is a extra 'v' in the link. The real link is https://lists.debian.org/debia...
drmad
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).
But Debian's approval process for developers might get swamped by people trying to gain Debian Developer status just for the free games.
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.
Cough cough: http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
Somehow I lost my rating points between loading the page and reading your post. Sorry I couldn't mod you up.
In the future we're going to have locked down devices running proprietary drivers, with proprietary apps and DRM'd content. But it'll run on open-source software. And the community is happy because "we finally got the manufacturers to write drivers for Linux".
And the free game was nice too.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
I expect the tweaks and changes they've had to make have been or will be posted upstream in due time. Who would want to keep applying patches instead of submitting them to the source projects for integration?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
People like you are really, really unpleasant to be around. Just seeing the negative in anything and everything.
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.
Try to remember that we are talking about Free as in Freedom, not free as in beer.
No one is expected to work for free. But we want to pay them with money, rather than with our rights.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You're right, the FOSS community doesnt give two squirts about this.
Valve does, however, and they would very much like you to as well. If they can generate a little buzz and fool you into thinking you should be 'praising' them for this then their marketing folks have done their job.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That's fine, no one is expecting them to publish the art portion of the game under a free license. It would be nice to get the actual code, but that is not the problem here either. What makes this a farce is the Digital Restrictions Management. Once I buy the game I should be able to run it without running another binary that I cannot audit or even relink and whose professed function - communicating with Valve and possibly preventing me from doing what I want with my computer if they do not send the right response - is inimical to my own interests.
If I paid for the program I should be able to install and run it on my gaming pc - which is quite deliberately NOT connectable to the internet. I will sneaker-net patches that are needed, but why on earth would I sneaker-net in a program whose only function will be to try to phone home over and over with obviously no response, and eventually effect a hostile take-over of my computer to prevent me from paying the game I bought and paid for?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Let's see...
Better drivers.
Better hardware support.
Improved API sets.
Improved platform awareness in the big software houses.
Better cross platform and porting toolkits.
Larger userbase for the basic OS tools (which means more unintentional bug-hunting and more amateur developers).
More money sloshing around at Debian HQ / Canonical / whoever.
Sounds good to me. I don't believe anyone's going to be confiscating my existing FOSS stuff because of any of the above. Just more good things on top of what I already have.
And, most importantly for me, if Linux really does become a new home for PC gaming, I can finally get rid of my last pesky Windows dual boot. It is literally the only thing keeping me hanging on to the platform outside of work.
No, Debian unstable is equivalent to a nightly build. At times it is usable, but many times it is broken so bad that you cannot even install it.
No, breaking changes are tested in experimental first. Unstable is usable by an end-user absent some really rare breakage. I've been using it as a regular user who isn't any kind of Debian developer as my desktop system for 10 years.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10