2026-09-15 23:33 UTC
Replies (3)
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@Azazel@lemmy.ml 2026-09-15 23:43
Corporations are by their nature entities with priorities that are not aligned to the good of society. It is natural and obvious that we do everything in our power to compel them to do the best thing for society rather than the best thing for them. Also while valve tends to be a pretty fair company they don’t need to be proprietary. Their product is selling game licenses and server space for cloud sync, none of that requires a closed source client. So while valve may be my favorite corpo they don’t get a pass from my previous statement about not being sympathetic to wanting to profit of community projects without giving back. The exact problem you point out is in my view a feature not a bug because it means there is an economic advantage to someone doing what steam does but open source. Which is exactly the sort of incentive that helps capitalism help people.
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@HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 2026-09-16 12:15
Pretty sure a GPL game can include non GPL parts, software doesn’t need to all be released under a single license for everything in the package. Look at CDDA, bunch of different licenses apply to parts of that and its on steam.
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@zaphod@sopuli.xyz 2026-09-17 08:19
For your example with Steam that would be perfectly fine to release under GPL, unless you signed an NDA to access Steams APIs or are actually including code provided by Valve under an incompatible license. Otherwise you couldn’t have GPL licensed software running on Windows using the Win32 APIs. What you can’t have is mixing code with incompatible licenses, but linking is fine.