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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that D3DMetal isn't open source. Worth noting that this stuff is exactly why people should strongly consider using a copyleft license. It's pretty annoying that nobody can build on top of Apple's work here or incorporate any improvements into DXVK, but that's the license the DXVK project chose.

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I don't care much for it being open source or not, it's just a shame Apple is making attempts to limit its use cases through licensing [1]. It's on brand for Apple and totally expected, but still sad. It's not going to stop a bunch of homebrew efforts springing up around it, but it will likely be enough to stop third party app stores like Steam from opening up a huge game library on the Mac in a straightforward way like what happened with Proton.

[1] The license is probably actually meaningless in a lot of jurisdictions, but it still has a chilling effect for commercial parties using it. That's probably exactly what Apple intends.

Well, i'm pro copyleft but in this case i have to disagree. This way Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster, and attrbution is given. If DXVK where GPL3 it might have happened years later if ever.

Huh, why are you saying Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster because DXVK was MIT-licensed? Literally nothing would've changed up until now if DXVK had been GPL-licensed, the only difference is that now that they've made it publicly available, they'd have had to license D3DMetal under a GPL-compatible license. Where does the extra delay come in?

They can weaponize it against Valve. Helping displace steam for relatively little effort bumped it up in priority.

Is it faster to build it to weaponize it against Valve than it is to build it without the weaponization?

There's only so much developer time and management focus. "This will help us cement our monopoly on software distribution without being too obvious to regulators" is a good pitch.

PS. I'm sure the people who pitched it and their managers are all sufficiently skilled at lying and lying to themselves to not put it or even think in those terms.

You can ship macOS native games on Steam as well. People need to stop throwing conspiracy theories. Their main motivation is to make sure games are native to macOS so they can take advantage of system-native features, which Win32-translated games won't. Otherwise games running on Macs will always be kind of janky and run slower than Windows.

So now they are propping up an ecosystem on which open computing will always be a second rank citizen at best. I wonder if they are all happy about it in retrospect, wine got patches, DXVK gets to be a brick in the wall of Apple's garden (if Valve can't distribute it, it's useless to them in the grand scheme of things, normal people want a one click install).

Monetarily good for the devs who ended up on Apple payroll, another nail in the coffin for competition and open computing at the same time.

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