Comment by TingPing
What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.
What do you mean by "open source the Machine"? Valve has stated its a regular open PC. The whole driver stack is open.
Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss.
It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.
Valve paying for the development of KDE, Wine and adjacent projects is beneficial for FOSS.
Adjacent projects to those have if anything only eroded the credit is where credits due. Ask any non-technically inclined Steam Deck owner who contributed to Linux to make it desktop useable and people will tell you desktop computing wasn’t possible until Valve did something. Valve does a very good job scrubbing the OS to look like Steam OS and not Wine, KDE, or Arch.
So while their adjacent projects have moved users to Linux, it is not the reason the desktop is a good experience.
Again Valve’s contributions have been mainly beneficial for Valve. They are perfectly comfortable taking money from Windows and Linux users and claiming to fight some sort of freedom of technology war, but the benefits for wider non-entertainment computing remain to be seen.
The hardware, like they did with the Steam Deck.