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.

You are right about teenagers, but on the other hand not all people are the same. For some reason we’ve decided that they are competent to make those kinds of decisions and to do other things like driving a car. So even though they are not adults, we don’t think of them as children either. There is probably no simple answer to this question, though.

Awesome photo!

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.

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.

Then it should be very easy for you to point out which part is idiotic. You are using the name of the kernel to describe the operating system and you accuse me of being clueless? You must be joking.

If you are asking what it means that a program is proprietary - it’s a program that doesn’t give the user the 4 essential freedoms: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

But if you are asking what parts of those projects are proprietary, then:

• in Linux it’s the binary blobs that it contains - that’s why distros like Debian have to remove them and why Linux-libre was created
• in Android at the very least it’s Google Play + the Linux kernel with blobs
• in SteamOS at the very least it’s the Steam client + the Linux kernel with blobs and according to gnu.org proprietary drivers - but I saw some people say that that last bit isn’t true and I don’t know how to verify that

Arch uses the same kernel with blobs, but it’s clear to see that SteamOS is more prorietary than Arch.

Steam comes with SteamOS. Steam is proprietary. Which part do you not understand?

We’d all like Steam to be open source, but that’s not going to happen for a number of reasons

We should fight to make that happen or at least not pretend that it’s fine.

We like Valve because they are actually contributing to open source projects, unlike Microsoft who say they love open source but don’t do anything to support it.

I don’t deny their contributions. We should praise them for the good work that they are doing, but at the same time we should criticize their bad behavior. Microsoft makes Free Software too (VS Code kinda, TypeScript) and they give money to the Linux Foundation. But they also do a lot of unethical things.