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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

> Fifth, oh, did you want to run a game? Not just a hello world? Then you need to deal with DirectX, audio (hello PulseAudio, my old friend), input devices (gamepads, joysticks), etc. It’s a lot of work!

These last paragraphs just made me realise how grateful I am to people who work on these open source projects without expecting any compensation or even praise for their work.

It has happened once or twice that I tried running something in Wine and it just wouldn't work which made me a little annoyed.

But reading how complex and difficult it is to make such things happen I am surprised the amount of effort it takes to even make Notepad.exe work!

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And let's not forget to be grateful towards for-profit companies that contribute to open source.

A lot of the work required to get games working transparently on Wine was thanks to Valve, who released Proton as open source, along with heavy work on DXVK to simulate DirectX, etc.

Of course they did it because it benefits them, but still they could have kept it private and it would have boosted only Steam sales. Instead it's a win for them AND for the community, an example that should be followed by other companies.

What a time to be alive indeed!

They couldn't have kept it private easily, since Wine is licensed LGPL.

All the more reason for praise; usually that license is understood by corporations to mean "don't even think about it". Not only did Valve get what they needed out of it, the community benefited as well. Seems commendable to me.

They had no choice, building your own Wine takes years to decades, even for well funded companies.

The outcome is still good for the community, but it doesn't mean Valve did it out of the kindness of their hearts.

They still went all in, built a nice community around Proton itself, documented it and supported forks, etc.

Yes, because their business profited from that. It's an example in favour of GPL licenses: the interests of the public and of a for-profit venture aligned to produce value for both.

So capitalism functioned how it should, and a company wasn't a greedy douchebag. Still seems commendable to me. They had a choice. Their choice was to do what most companies do, and ignore barely-enforceable licensing; or to give back. They chose the better route.

Is Valve still just a company with profit as its main motive? Yeah, that's the point. But it can do helpful things as a side-effect.

> And let's not forget to be grateful towards for-profit companies that contribute to open source.

The main sponsor of WINE is CodeWeavers, who have been paying folks that work on WINE for a very long time, and are involved in Proton development:

https://www.codeweavers.com/

They sell a supported version of WINE for Linux, macOS and ChromeOS, as well as providing engineering services to clients like Valve.

I believe the vast majority of people who work in Open Source graphics are actually employed to do so. There are very few people working without compensation, and once they do a handful of meaningful contributions they get offered jobs. We should be actually thankful to the for-profit companies sponsoring those people instead of investing in more closed-source stuff (Intel, AMD, Collabora, Igalia, Red Hat, Code Weavers, VMware, and a few dozen of others I am missing, heck even NVidia contributes to Open Source graphics, although not as much as we would like them to).

> These last paragraphs just made me realise how grateful I am to people who work on these open source projects without expecting any compensation or even praise for their work.

I think it's reasonable to expect both, even if indirectly. Participating in a well-organized open source project confers extremely rich experience, and employers do take notice. In my company, the folks who spent time in the community generally noticeably out-perform the ones who grew up exclusively in industry (which should trouble industry) at similar years of experience. If you want to end up highly-compensated, it's a great way to spend your time.

The real challenge for the open source community is how hard it still is to make a living sticking to the original open source work, instead of taking your talent and leaving one day. Wine is one of a few exceptions with some companies in its ecosystem, but generally speaking there's not enough upstream-work jobs for a lot of important open source software infrastructure.

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