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Comment by xSwag | Hacker News Reader

So what is the chance that Gaben will make everything proprietary? Releasing games for the SteamOS with license restrictions to make them unplayable on other Linux distros? What if he makes a deal with AMD/NVidia to make drivers only for SteamOS which won't be available to normal Linux users? I don't want linux to go towards that direction.

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Remember, Gabe used to work at MS. He knows how they work, and knows the pros and cons of the way they do business. Nowadays, you have companies like IBM, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and many others embracing Linux, none of them have ruined the 'open-ness' of Linux, they've all contributed. Gabe should be smart enough to know that all he needs is a platform on which his ecosystem can run. Chrome is a platform, Steam is a platform - it's in their interest to make their platform as portable as possible - in otherwords run on any Linux base...

What reason does he have to do any of this?

Valve makes money if you buy games on Steam on other distros too.

Also Valve is not scared of piracy. Steamworks have been a joke since day 1 and kept that way on purpose.

That would turn their most vocal supporters into enemies, destroy their plans to make Linux a viable gamming plataform (and Valve needs Linux to be viable, for keeping MS from destrying them), assure that nobody ever uses their new SteamOS (people that don't care are already doing similar stuff with Windows), and alienate everybody that is selling specialized Steam hardware.

Unless they get a MS-like world domination, the chances of that happening are near enough 0 that you'd better care about other problems.

in other words, they'll wait until they are fully embraced...;)

Don't be ridiculous -- Canonical has taken control of Ubuntu development and now they have a reputation for being authoritarian and secretive. There are fewer ways to alienate the open-source community than that and yet Ubuntu's popularity soars.

The more critical people are of Canonical, the more fervent Ubuntu supporters become. "How will they make money" will be parroted just as loudly, if not more-so.

And Canonical has GPL'd everything they've done. What proprietary bits has Canonical added? Free software isn't some hippie co-operative - it's about the ability to freely modify software the way you see fit. If Canonical's changes were worthless, people wouldn't adopt them. But Ubuntu is #1...

Ubuntus popularity is anything but soaring these days, mint has more or less taken over its former crown.

Hah. I'd wager that in real world installs Ubuntu has at least 20x-50x the installs (Wikimedia statistics support this assertion), never mind Ubuntu server installs.

How many people ever visit Distrowatch (the only statistic on the web that supports the idea that Mint > Ubuntu) once they settle on a distro?

I've yet to see this anywhere but numbers on the Internet. I hear people talking about Ubuntu, I see people using Ubuntu, and I see computers coming pre-loaded with Ubuntu. I've never seen anyone using Mint, heard anyone talking about Mint, or see machines pre-loaded with Mint.

I love Ubuntu. So do the 20 or so other people I know that use Linux--I have not heard of a single person sticking with mint; a few have used it for a bit and gone back (not sure why---I should ask). I have never used Mint myself, maybe it is great, I am just reporting the numbers I have seen.

Not much. They benefit a lot from the open image and maintenance model. Going proprietary on the platform side makes zero sense and would just increase the cost and bind a lot of resources better used for generating money with their core business.

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