You seem to have trouble understanding the fact that people can buy things and share them with those who can’t.

I’ve already given you an example of the game Mindustry, which people buy on Steam (16k reviews): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry, even though it’s released under a free software license and you can get it for free on Itch: https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and you can get its source code on GitHub: https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry.

The only reason why the industry is surviving is because most people understand that they need to pay for the entertainment they consume.

Weird, huh? For some reason the internet and Bittorrent hasn’t changed that.

They never hacked your computer, you agreed to everything. So what’s the problem then? It’s just a file that can be shared.

A lot of people don’t have a problem with that. I do, which is why I don’t use proprietary software. If I took a photo of myself (or of anything else) and posted it publicly on social media, I would do it under a free license, so that people could share it. I do that with software that I make. But that doesn’t mean I want to share everything - there are many things I want to keep private, so I will not post them publicly. There is no contradiction here.

I’m not talking only about you. I’m talking about how senseless the “I can share files with anyone” is. If that were true, companies could really fuck their customers, but thankfully it isn’t logical, thus it is illegal.

I’m pretty sure companies already legally sell user data, though? Laws don’t define what is logical or what is moral.

Imagine if a single person could buy a movie and then place it in their Facebook to share with their friends. And then their friends share with their friends. And so on… because it’s just a file, nobody is stealing, copying information isn’t stealing! … Who would make a movie under those conditions?

People already share movies online and it’s very easy. You don’t have to pay for any digital file ever, but people choose to do it anyway. Copying files is not stealing, because it’s not a physical object - you can make an infinite amount of copies at no cost.

If you want to own the movie, you need to buy a real copy. If you are buying a digital copy, you do not own the movie. There is already a solution for your problem, real copies.

Movies sold on DVD and Blu-ray contain DRM. You can’t make copies (even for personal use) without breaking the DRM, which is illegal. If there was no DRM, you could at least make copies for personal use, which would be an improvement, but you still wouldn’t own the files.

So sure, if you want a bunch of industries to die, keep believing and convincing others of that.

Copying and sharing files only keeps getting easier and those industries haven’t died. People even sell things like games and books under a free license. One such game is Mindustry - I bought a copy myself and I can legally share it with anyone. This game is even available for free on some platforms, but people buy it anyway.

The only reason you can watch your pirated movie is the fact that other people actually pay for the content. So you’re really stealing from people who now have to pay more to access the content.

You can’t steal something that’s infinite. I would pay for the movies though (even if they aren’t released under a free license) if there was a way to buy them without DRM. But there isn’t and I’m not going to support unethical practices with my money.

There could be a website where you would be able to buy DRM-free movies and you could download them. We have such stores for music, books and games. But the movie studios are greedy, so they choose to abuse people with DRM.

Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.

Only if it’s a file that’s already publicly available. When you buy a movie, why shouldn’t you be able to share it with others? I’m not saying that you should be able to hack a filmmaker’s computer and publish movies they’ve never released, though.

The scenario you described can’t happen to me anyway, because I only use Free Software. You can learn more about it here: https://piped.video/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM

They shouldn’t collect data in the first place.

I think it’s easier for a person to say “piracy is bad” than “sharing files is bad”. Because why would sharing be wrong? But if you give it a bad name, a lot of people will automatically assume that it is something bad. It’s a simple trick, but it works. If we want to change the way people think about copyright, we shouldn’t let anyone imply that sharing information is the same as stealing ships and murdering people on them.

“Piracy” is a propaganda term. We shouldn’t use it. There is nothing wrong with sharing files.

Here is an article from the FSF explaining why we should avoid making such compromises: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html . They probably explain this a lot better than me, so if it doesn’t convince you, then probably nothing will.

Neither is mine, the cost is extremely minor in this case, because steam is a gaming client, and the fundamental nature of a gaming client is non-essential and not integrated into the system deeply at all.

You could use this excuse to justify almost any type of proprietary software. Most apps are not deeply integrated into the system. That doesn’t make them ethical.

What you fail to understand is people being on windows is way worse in every single way than them having one proprietary app on their computer.

It is more free than Windows and I never said otherwise. I just said that it was still unethical.

There is huge benefit, more people are using much more FOSS, and the fact is, if more people were on linux, there’d be more foss software, which means better alternatives and outcompeting proprietary software.

But those people don’t care about their freedom. That’s the problem. They will always use proprietary software, because they only care about convenience or features. We need to change that. Only then our movement will benefit from this. We can’t let them get attached to Valve as long as they make proprietary software.

Steam ain’t that. It’s video games. And nothing else.

Games are software. If you can’t control what they do on your device, then you don’t control the device.

Steam isn’t going to be what “traps” them or anything, especially when it’s sandboxed, and when you sandbox it, it has literally no integration with the rest of your system at all.

You are assuming that a company that makes proprietary software won’t try to get more power over their users. Why wouldn’t they? Their users don’t even care. Sandboxing improves your security (which is good), but not your freedom. You still can’t see what the software does or change it, so that program is still unethical.

Games don’t come with the source code.

Most of them don’t, but some do. Just like with programs and apps.

Do they provide ethical installers?

They don’t provide any, you just download the game itself. Or you can use their Free Software client, which will download and update the games for you.

Check the Historical section.

Those distros are just not being developed anymore, so they are no longer recommended.

Why do you bash Valve but not any other company like Apple, Nvidia etc?

I do. I will never buy anything from those companies.

The distros being removed from this list mostly by requests from maintainers means it’s not actively monitored or researched at all. So by not verifying it you put yourself on a mercy of other people. It will fail, if not already.

What are you talking about? It’s a list made by the Free Software Foundation. What was removed? If some information is incorrect, you should be able to prove it.

That’s because you have to use consoles to even read them. They contain hardware DRM and are far from being ethical.

I don’t know what hardware DRM means, but they use proprietary software, so you are right that they are unethical. I never said they were.

Am I missing something or you’re thinking that starting with least offenders is a good idea?

I don’t know what you mean.

You do. But hey you end up with DRM free games you like so much.

But to get there I have to use unethical proprietary software that I hate so much.

By the way why so you even want games? Aren’t most of them unethical?

Who said I do?

Gog offline installers are also unethical, no?

Of course. This is why itch.io is better than gog.

My goal isn’t to increase the number of GNU/Linux users at all cost. I see very little benefit from people using GNU/Linux if they will use proprietary software on it, unless it’s only a temporary solution for them. If people stop using one proprietary platform only to be trapped in another without realizing it, then something went wrong. Some people ditch Android only to use SailfishOS. Or they ditch Twitter only to use Threads. So I hope those new GNU/Linux users who know nothing about the Free Software movement don’t get trapped again.

Steam is an unethical DRM platform, so I will always criticize it regardless if it makes people switch to GNU/Linux.

Also the Linux kernel and possibly some drivers according to the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html. But I don’t know how to verify that last part.

You’d need to get literally every Linux copyright holder to agree to it, including the major corpos like Intel.

Yes, it’s hard, but it was probably way easier in 2007 when GPLv3 came out. Linus Torvalds never wanted to do it anyway, though.

There’s always socialism, and I think there’s a better chance for that to come to be than for Intel to limit itself over some FOSS ideals.

I don’t see how socialism would get rid of proprietary software. I don’t think it says anything about copyright unlike the Free Software movement. Does Intel make devices that come with the Linux kernel?

No I’m asking why do you think V3 shouldn’t be a separate license, but AGPL should. GPL V3 expands what GPL affects by a lot. V2 is only relevant for derivatives and showing your code, V3 is relevant for anything that might restrict your usage of that code. Meanwhile AGPL only changes when you need to show your code, right?

To me it makes no difference if GPL and AGPL are a separate license or not. I use both, but I could just license everything under AGPL. Here is the FSF’s explanation: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero . I think the FSF considers Tivoization to be a bug of GPLv2. When they wrote it in the 90s, they probably just didn’t predict that someone will find a workaround. They made AGPL, but also LGPL. I think they just want people to use the one that makes the most sense for the project that they are working on. At the same time they probably consider GPLv2 to be obsolete - I don’t think they want people to use it anymore.

IANAL, but I’d love to know how v3 interacts with other reasons for locking down devices. They’ve limited it to exclude obvious examples like modifying medical devices and voting machines, but do parental controls cause the device to be operated in a manner that restricts the user’s GPL freedoms?

I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure it just means that you should be able to install another operating system. Parental controls can be turned off by the user, so I see no issue there.

Just imagine this insanity: stop your child from installing apps on their phone - get sued by someone who doesn’t understand why children can’t consent to sex with adults.

If you are talking about Richard Stallman, then he doesn’t believe that anymore. The organization that sues people for GPL violations is probably The Software Freedom Conservancy.

Arch’s kernel contains proprietary blobs, so it’s not exactly Free Software. SteamOS just makes it more proprietary.

Yep. You can’t control what those games do on your system.

Realistically, what are you expecting?

Just for people to acknowledge that Steam is unethical and that we can do better. That’s it.

If Valve suddenly decided tomorrow to release all of their source code on Github, all you’d get is a big blob of source code that is purpose built for Valve themselves and not really modular. They’d have so much technical debt and auditing requirements that it’d probably be easier to start from scratch, which I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to do.

You could make the same excuse for any company. Releasing the code under a Free Software license is all that’s needed. Even if it’s hard to compile (but it has to be doable) and even if the code is a mess. It’s their responsibility as developers to not take away people’s freedom and to not put themselves in a position of power over users. They can use a Copyleft license if they don’t want they code to be used by proprietary competition.

And honestly, nothing closed source that Steam does is really novel enough to warrant being open source. The value of Steam comes from its ecosystem and playerbase, as well as the backing of Valve themselves. That’s not something that an open source Steam server or client would allow people to compete with.

It’s not about innovation, it’s about people being able to control the software that runs on their computers. The rest doesn’t matter.

I would like them to release an open source command line tool for downloading, launching and DRM-validating-ing games though. That seems reasonable for people who don’t want to run the full client and want something like Heroic or Lutris to be able to hook into.

They could release the code to a lot of things. For example their proprietary Steam SDK library. Currently games that are libre software have to use this proprietary library to use Steam’s features. DRM is unethical too and if Steam was Free Software, people would probably just remove it (kinda like crackers already do) or at least make it less annoying. This would only affect Valve’s DRM and modern games often have multiple forms of DRM, but it would be an improvement still.

My point is that Steam doesn’t have to be proprietary. You can make money in an ethical way with Free Software. Itch.io does this by providing a Free Software client. There is no excuse for making nonfree software. I don’t know why they didn’t use BSD like Sony did, but it really doesn’t matter.

If something contains proprietary software, then it’s proprietary. I know that you can turn SteamOS into a Free Software system. At the very least you would have to remove Steam (this is easy), use a Linux kernel without proprietary blobs (might be harder, but Arch has the same issue) and maybe some other things (I don’t know about the drivers). It’s nice that this is possible, but it’s still proprietary by default and that is wrong.

My priority is not for GNU/Linux (or any other particular OS) to get the most users. It’s not the goal of the Free Software movement. The goal is for people to use Free Software and for proprietary software to be destroyed. Valve makes proprietary software, so they are working against us. If your goal is for people to have freedom and control over their devices, you should criticize those actions too. You can do that, while also praising Valve for the good things that they do. Maybe Valve can change and become better, but if not then at least people should be aware of the situation. If you are against proprietary software, then you should understand that Steam being proprietary is bad for us. But maybe you care about features more than freedom - then we probably won’t agree on this.

If your goal is to get as many people using as much FOSS software as possible, steam is your ally.

I want people to eventually use fully free systems. It can be a gradual process, but this won’t happen if we don’t make our end goal clear to people. Companies that make nonfree software won’t do this - they use the term Open Source to avoid talking about freedom and avoid mentioning that proprietary software is bad. So we have to do this ourselves. You can you Steam and SteamOS if you want and at the same time tell people that we can do better than that. That’s all you have to do - just accept that they current situation isn’t perfect and that we can work on improving it.