Just wish it was coming from a non-commercial entity. Puts a sour note on the status of Linux gaming that a for-profit entity is the only one out there making meaningful progress.
Lots of for-profit commercial entities contribute to open source projects.
The code they’re contributing is covered by the same license as the code contributed by volunteer developers.
I understand why we should be cautious about these things, but the current situation is that Valve is contributing a lot and their contributions are open source. Yeah, they’re doing it for a profit motive, but not to the point where they’re trying to kill open source projects or hide the updates behind proprietary binaries.
Valve is, currently, not being evil. GabeN has plenty of yacht money.
Nah. No one, not even Gabe Newell, deserves a billion dollars. The very act of having that much wealth when there are still hungry and homeless people is in itself evil.
To relativise his wealth at least a little (not by much though, he’s still part of a fucked up system): Some of it will he due to his ownership of companies with a lot of assets. In case of Valve, that is at least preferable to public ownership and the attendant pressure to make more and more profit at any cost. Worker-owned would be better, but leaving that aside:
Companies have assets. Even without their profit expectations driving (speculative) stock prices, the office equipment all has some book value, and the value of a company is comprised in part by the sum of that value. If you have a company with, say, 200k in IT hardware, and you own 75% of it, that’s an asset value of 150k. Subtract, say, 25k in debts, and you’re left with 175k equity, of which you own 143k.
Valve supposedly has an equity of 10 Billion USD. Gabe owning over half of it puts him at 5 Billion just for owning that company. It’s not all “hoarded money”, or at least not directly. Liquidating it (e.g. to donate the money) would mean selling (parts of) Valve, and I dread to think just who would have the wealth and desire to buy, and what they would do with their controlling interest.
So the wealth itself is a result of the way capitalism treats equity and ownership, so that having the sovereignty to make business decisions require him to own more than half the company. If we concede that he’s less malicious than other billionaires, we’d still have to replace the underlying system, but I wouldn’t immediately group him with the rest of the actively greedy and exploitative lot.
Again, it would be better to have the workers share in that wealth. That would mean giving up his control and I’m not sure he’d be willing to do that. He’s not a saint. I just hope he never turns into a devil instead.
Right, but we look at examples like Chromium and we can see where there is still so much potential for things to go sideways. GabeN and his yacht could sink to the bottom of the sea and his estate sells control of Valve to someone less benevolent.
A commercial entity that has enough control over a project pushes the direction of that project in their favor. And sure you can fork a FOSS project at any time, but once the commercialized version has enough saturation, user inertia and lack of experienced developers to take that initiative often prevents alternatives from achieving success.
I think the big difference is Valve isn’t really in control of many of the projects they’re funding, they’re mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.
Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.
It’s either slave labor or there is SOME form of for profit company is involved somewhere in the chain. Those are basically your two options.
Even purely free work given willingly in someone’s free time is still supported by proxy of some form of corporate entity. No one lives for free.
All that matters is the license. If you care any more beyond that your either stupid or dealing with active Nazis. And I don’t see any Nazis in valve so…
Just wish it was coming from a non-commercial entity. Puts a sour note on the status of Linux gaming that a for-profit entity is the only one out there making meaningful progress.
Lots of for-profit commercial entities contribute to open source projects.
The code they’re contributing is covered by the same license as the code contributed by volunteer developers.
I understand why we should be cautious about these things, but the current situation is that Valve is contributing a lot and their contributions are open source. Yeah, they’re doing it for a profit motive, but not to the point where they’re trying to kill open source projects or hide the updates behind proprietary binaries.
Valve is, currently, not being evil. GabeN has plenty of yacht money.
Yup, long as it’s copyleft (GPL) open source, I don’t care if it’s microslop paying.
That said, watch out for a new wave of EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) using unmaintainable AI code, and be ready to fork.
Valve, not so much.
Yeah, exactly. If they ever try anything you can just fork from just before that update.
While they play nice, their contributions are welcome and improve software for everyone.
Gabe really is one of the exceptions that not all CEOs are evil bastards.
Nah. No one, not even Gabe Newell, deserves a billion dollars. The very act of having that much wealth when there are still hungry and homeless people is in itself evil.
To relativise his wealth at least a little (not by much though, he’s still part of a fucked up system): Some of it will he due to his ownership of companies with a lot of assets. In case of Valve, that is at least preferable to public ownership and the attendant pressure to make more and more profit at any cost. Worker-owned would be better, but leaving that aside:
Companies have assets. Even without their profit expectations driving (speculative) stock prices, the office equipment all has some book value, and the value of a company is comprised in part by the sum of that value. If you have a company with, say, 200k in IT hardware, and you own 75% of it, that’s an asset value of 150k. Subtract, say, 25k in debts, and you’re left with 175k equity, of which you own 143k.
Valve supposedly has an equity of 10 Billion USD. Gabe owning over half of it puts him at 5 Billion just for owning that company. It’s not all “hoarded money”, or at least not directly. Liquidating it (e.g. to donate the money) would mean selling (parts of) Valve, and I dread to think just who would have the wealth and desire to buy, and what they would do with their controlling interest.
So the wealth itself is a result of the way capitalism treats equity and ownership, so that having the sovereignty to make business decisions require him to own more than half the company. If we concede that he’s less malicious than other billionaires, we’d still have to replace the underlying system, but I wouldn’t immediately group him with the rest of the actively greedy and exploitative lot.
Again, it would be better to have the workers share in that wealth. That would mean giving up his control and I’m not sure he’d be willing to do that. He’s not a saint. I just hope he never turns into a devil instead.
I guess. Does he not donate to any charities or anything?
He donates sometimes not super often. Definitely not a big philanthropist in that way.
But he does fund ocean research. So that’s cool.
At least one silver lining I guess
Right, but we look at examples like Chromium and we can see where there is still so much potential for things to go sideways. GabeN and his yacht could sink to the bottom of the sea and his estate sells control of Valve to someone less benevolent.
A commercial entity that has enough control over a project pushes the direction of that project in their favor. And sure you can fork a FOSS project at any time, but once the commercialized version has enough saturation, user inertia and lack of experienced developers to take that initiative often prevents alternatives from achieving success.
I think the big difference is Valve isn’t really in control of many of the projects they’re funding, they’re mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.
Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.
Unfortunately it’s very hard to fund non profit work in the current economy.
on the flip, it’s heartening to see an influential company like Valve actually not being shitty.
Better than the ones that take and give nothing back though
It’s either slave labor or there is SOME form of for profit company is involved somewhere in the chain. Those are basically your two options.
Even purely free work given willingly in someone’s free time is still supported by proxy of some form of corporate entity. No one lives for free.
All that matters is the license. If you care any more beyond that your either stupid or dealing with active Nazis. And I don’t see any Nazis in valve so…