Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?
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gnu.org
I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance.
But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but story editors, 2D/3D artists, composers, voice artists etc that create experience, not a tool or platform. Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? Or may be you want to get your hands on petabytes of data that went into production of Avatar so that you could fix a couple of landscapes?
Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.
We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it.
Games are entertainment.
Games are culture.
I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current technology.
There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and copyright holders can't stop them being made available.
I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of Congress, because I value software.
Granted, such games are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of at all are some of iD's games, and even those were only opened long after the games' initial release dates.)
Sadly, that game is non-free, and Person X is unable to study the source code. Person X learns nothing other than that he/she has been denied this knowledge and must go seek it out from another source.
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There's other reasons. What if the game saved all my data to a remote server and I wished to modify the game to save it locally? Or, perhaps the game crashed every time I entered a certain room and I did not want to wait for a fix from the original developers (which may never happen --- what if this game is now unsupported due to its age?).
You buy a game. It sucks. You wish to sell it, and use the money towards buying another game.
Games are moving towards not allowing this type of sale.
Did rms just admit that proprietary software can theoretically have benefits? What's this world coming to lol
I thought the point he made in this article was a balanced one.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979
As far as the internet, though, as I told a friend long ago - Richard Stallman doesn't need the internet. The internet needs Richard Stallman.
Perhaps he realises that having steam + valve games would be a huge net win for desktop linux use.
Even if you had mainly nonfree software , in theory desktop linux would still be quite a free system in the sense that there would be a level playing field amongst software devs.
Note he actually says "Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical". That one believes an act is unethical is different from believing it will have a net negative effect vs not performing the act, and there's often a lot of nuance to be had when something is ethically questionable.
Consider the periodically-raised question of taking control of a botnet in order to shut it down. Opinions on this range from "totally ethical" to "totally unethical", even as much of the "totally unethical" crowd would probably admit that shutting down the botnet is a net good vs not doing so.
Sometimes, "X is unethical" doesn't mean "no good will come of X", it means "we need a third option". RMS believes non-free software is unethical, almost surely believes the existence of software in general is a net good, and that Free Software is the "third option".
I'm sure I've heard Stallman say in the past that software cannot possibly be in any way good unless it is free.
>Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users
I get the feeling he lives in a fantasy world. Unethical is hitting a baby in the face, not allowing people to see how you wrote a computer programme.
As more of our world is software and we rely on it to do things like store our personal information and trust it to respect our privacy etc, how is the availability and ability to understand and inspect that software not a potentially very ethical issue?
Proprietary software isn't a really bad thing, comparing it to say murder or thievery. If you had to choose between doing the wrong thing (which isn't that bad) and not eating, most people would do the wrong thing.
The free or nonfreeness of a particular piece of software is as much of a moral question as the color of sand on a beach.
I feel like restricting the definition of freedom fairly narrowly goes against the very definition of freedom itself... but then again he's free to do that too.
In general, people sometimes ask this question about FOSS and security. Isn't FOSS bad for security, they say, since attackers can look at your code and find the holes so they can break in? What this assumes is that the holes are inevitable and obvious, and all anyone needs to break in is find them. It turns out that this isn't true, as many security-sensitive open source projects from OpenBSD to Mozilla Firefox have demonstrated. Security holes shouldn't exist; help from the community to prevent this is key. The hope that code will be more secure if we only keep it secret - otherwise known as "security through obscurity" - is a pipe dream.
How would that work? If I have the source code of Starcraft, I can turn on the "Make the whole map visible" variable, and there's nothing whatsoever that encryption can do to prevent that. With closed-source, as far as I know, Blizzard's constant patching makes cheating relatively uncommon on their own servers.
I have an example of OSS software with yet no cheater. Check out xonotic (www.xonotic.org), a heavily modified quake based shooter. They partly implement anti-cheat functionality by more or less shifting tasks from the client side to the server side, making e.g. wallhacks impossible. Also they use encryption for certain packages to prevent them from being tapered with. Aimbots are another thing, but I have yet to see one. I didn't really dig into the security features though, that is just what I picked up by casually browsing the forums...
I think that the solution is radical: I think that as much much time and effort should be put into making the binary unhackable as is put into the game. Ultimately, DRM(1) is a game, and a lot of programmers are addicted to breaking it anyway.
What's funny about DRM in the case of an online game is that it's actually a feature that customers would pay extra for, and a premium for quality DRM. Hopefully, we'll have good companies and groups creating it, and online games (whether given away or sold) will advertise and brag about what kind of DRM that they're using.
(1) I'm using the term DRM because I can't figure out a better term - but it's more like tamper management, isn't it?
Putting stuff server side might help - meaning it doesn't matter so much what client people are using.
I don't think Valve is being unethical in protecting their games. They're not controlling their products because "fuck you consumers, we are evil and wish to suppress your rights", they're doing it (at least I presume) because if they didn't, no one would buy their games and they wouldn't be able to operate. A food vendor can't make a similar claim (well, at least not in as strong a way -- though I guess there are things like secret recipes) to justify hiding things from consumers.
1) Custom software development (i.e bespoke client work) and 2) Crowdsourcing
The custom software argument seems odd, even though the main user (the client) would get the source code and freedom in that instance not only does it promote keeping software locked away as trade secrets, in most cases the actual end users will not get freedom with the software it will really just be senior management.
At the core of food are plants that have a set of easily copiable and modifiable DNA. Apparently, biotech corps think that they have DRM on plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
It's a black box so to speak. Someone else pointed out the food comparison, it would in fact be unethical to sell someone food without telling them how it was produced and what was in it, and I think that's a reasonable take on the software situation.
However, one could argue that the GPL makes it almost impossible to build a traditional software sales business if the product is GPL licensed. The first person who buys it gains a legal exception to copyright to give it out freely, but that happens whether its GPL licensed or proprietary, we just call it piracy in the latter case.
So in some respect they're working against the idea of traditional software sales as a side effect of upholding the freedoms they promote.
Extending the analogy to software, if your program accesses personal information, contacts remote servers, inserts itself into the kernel, etc. then you have an ethical obligation to publish that behavior. But there's no ethical obligation to provide the source code, and indeed, providing the source code wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your other obligations (because it wouldn't be accessible to 99% of users).
If that means someone else can come along and reproduce it, tough.
DRM? Groan.
But really, who cares, let the user decide. Why does the freeness of the OS have to predicate the distribution, license or otherwise of the software used on it?
However, just because you are free to do something does not mean you should. All the FSF is doing is presenting a clear, well-argued and rather balanced argument about whether you should support non-free games on Linux or not.
This is a complex issue and it is treated as a complex issue; all they do is provide their views on what would further free software most.
As to who cares: anybody who supports freedom of software cares. And, while such people are in the minority here (going off the OS poll I saw a while back), they still make up a significant percentage of the audience.
I care too. But I'm not every user and I'm not prescribing something for someone else. I'm all in favor of (the FSF) informing people and empowering people to choose free software free of DRM, but I'm also not going to imply that using a free OS means forgoing games or other things that might require DRM because developers (think they) need it to protect their IP and make a profit.
We simply discourage it.
One thing to keep in mind is that most of the time, he doesn't want to force anyone to do anything (other than make sure that code free if it was written under the GPL, even when modifications are made). He just suggests that people who value freedom do or don't do certain things.