Comment by Root_Denied

The problem I have with this approach is that ultimately you're trading one owning company for another, rather than building to a standard that anyone could build around.

Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.

Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.