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> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to sa

by waplot 4y ago

> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to say, 'Let's move off this non-free thing, and play a game that is free. So we can have the same pleasure, but without paying freedom as the price.'“ i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like? i can only imagine the average teenage gamer trying to get their friends to stop playing virtually every game on the market and instead play some obscure game and trying to teach them how to install gcc and git to get it running

christophilus 4y ago
I’m a gamer. Given a choice between two games of similar quality, I’d choose the free / hackable one every time. There are tens of us, I tell you.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
Just because it isn't realistic in today's AAA world doesn't mean the man is wrong. As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Stallman is not right as a matter of principle. His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale. It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him. But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith. To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.
  - car_analogy 4y ago
    > Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. ..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem? > To most of the population there is zero difference between the two. Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      As a programmer, the number of times a project's closed-source nature has prevented me from fixing a problem I had as a user is... one. The number of times I've availed myself of the open-source code of a project to fix a problem I had as a user is... zero--and that includes the projects I was a maintainer of! Both of these numbers are dwarfed by the number of times being closed-source hasn't prevented me from fixing a problem (as it turns out that reverse-engineering a file format is often an effective solution that rarely needs source code). So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard. There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem. [1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    To expand on car_analogy's point: you're ignoring second-order effects. Look at the avalanche of user-hostile nonsense that has become the norm in non-Free software. Much of it is incompatible with the FOSS model. * Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that. * Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state * Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed * Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security * Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics * Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox) * edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption * For more see [1] If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself. > Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866 [1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html
rasengan0 4y ago
What a coincidence Today I downloaded a free game and having fun [1] $ colossal-cave-adventure WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
zrm 4y ago
Try it this way: You create a game which is actually good. People want to play it a lot. It costs $0 and becomes popular. It's easy to mod so it gets a big community. And everything gets released on GNU/Linux two months before it gets ported to anything else.
- s1291 4y ago
  "Free" in Free Software doesn't mean 0$ cost.
orbital-decay 4y ago
Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise. It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. It's already so bad that you practically need a separate machine for many games if you want to run anything remotely resembling a VM on your main one, and it's going to get much worse. (ex. TPM requirement in some games on Win11) And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.
- mixologic 4y ago
  I feel like free software, and RMS's biggest blind spot is the network, between people, and between computers. Everything is framed and discussed in this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed, or installed software on, to also do something valueable. Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface. Which means, that in order to do anything useful, you need to communicate with some other service that is running software that has access to your data. The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious. Take something as old and as open as IRC. I have absolutely no way of knowing if the server Im connecting to is actually running the software I think it is, unmodified. The only people who have that level of access, have root on the server. Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    > The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious. How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain. Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet? That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.
jhbadger 4y ago
There are some really addictive games that are open source though. And some of them are quite rightly famous. For example, Nethack. I've played Nethack for countless hours over the course of decades. It's definitely given me more entertainment than 99% of all commercial games that I've bought, and I have it installed on all my computers (and there are even phone versions). https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/ https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Doom 3 might technically qualify, the source code was released under the GPL years back. The caveat was that you needed the creative assets to play it (although I'm pretty sure it would happily run with custom maps). I especially like this model. You get the source but the people who worked on the game still get paid.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    I do too. Romero spoke about this a while back. Several members of the team at ID, Romero included, got started on the Apple ][ computers. Those machines were completely open, software driven everything! I keep one as a reminder of my own roots, and the machine is still fun! (Romero keeps his too, as do many from that time period, but I digress...) The author behind Beagle Brothers software and educational materials was a huge impact on many of us, and ID. They released their code so that others may create and so that their games live on for the people who enjoy playing them. Open matters, and that's why one can play doom on almost everything these days, as one example. It's a great model. What I've enjoyed is seeing the ID team watch what others do, and share in all the fun from a secure position having been well paid, no worries beyond that. And frankly, they can STILL sell those creative assets. People would still buy them.
- macns 4y ago
  got a 404 error for the linux link: http://nethack.org/v360/ports/download-linux.html http://nethack.org/v360/ports/download-linux.html sudo apt install nethack
- 4y ago
zeruch 4y ago
"what does stallman think gamers are like?" He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him. And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.
- robocat 4y ago
  There are plenty of examples where somebody who has influenced the world was an idealist, out of touch with societal norms. RMS has serious faults, but his virtues have an immense value in my opinion. ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Tho, those unreasonable men also fairly often cause quite a lot of damage to their own causes and to world in general. Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.
    - e3bc54b2 4y ago
      > Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false. This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable. For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.
      - halostatue 4y ago
        Except that Edison didn’t invent the electric light bulb (first invented in 1806). https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-light-bulb/ https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...
atoav 4y ago
I mean many games do have a privacy problem and I can't imagine it will just go on like this.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Sure. But let’s postulate that people would rather be monitored 24/7 than play the AAA game from even a a few years ago, and in order to stop playing AAA games and start playing free software, what is the realistic path there? Giving a yearly speech? Being dogmatic doesn’t help here I think. Start from the fact (people must play billion dollar budget games) and work backwards. How can privacy be improved, etc. Saying “solitaire has fewer privacy issues than this AAA game” is like saying “walking is better than driving”. That doesn’t improve cars.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    We shouldn't expect one person to solve these issues though, I think. In my opinion it's perfectly valid from him to just point out the problem, or give a recap of the state of things and point out trends. It's up to everyone else to make of it what they will. I personally tested many of the foss games myself, and then pitched the ones to my group when we wanted to play games. Due to me trying them first and work out some kinks beforehand, onboarding was easy and we ended up having a good amount of fun. I also like your train of thought however. Which is why I'm happy to support Steam in their effort with Proton. They surely can't make everyone release a Linux version, so what if Wine could run all of the games instead? I like this idea in general and it also enabled me to not reboot into Windows to play some of my favorites.
Lammy 4y ago
He's right, though, even if his proposal isn't practical. Games/movies/music/etc "justify" the development of DRM technologies that inevitably metastasize in time to further lock down general-purpose computing itself.
nathias 4y ago
You do know most of the current best games were free mods at some point?
ddingus 4y ago
At a minimum, those gamers need to look at the past, and their own future. See, when hardware was more open, I was able to preserve and continue to play the games I enjoy. In fact, I can disassemble them, learn from them, make my own. The gamers of today won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms, if they are playing them at all. This is just one of the many things Stallman is right about. Laughing at him is generally unwise. Ask a bunch of us how we know. Seriously.
- lovich 4y ago
  >won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    They will. They will want to share their roots, tell their stories, etc...
  - the_af 4y ago
    > "Do they care?" I guarantee you that they will. They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the impossibility of porting it without breaking some law), then they will care.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      And then I try one and wonder this looks really ugly. This mechanic is rather annoying, yeah maybe it isn't worth the nostalgia. Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...
danjac 4y ago
Stallman probably thinks the state of the art is "GNU-Penguin-On-A-Sled".
crazypython 4y ago
under the free software philosophy (free SOFTWARE), art assets are allowed to be non-free, but stallman believes the game code itself should be free. considering games rely heavily on art, this model still lets you sell games. Stallman isn't a free culture person
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  To add to this: here's a source confirming the FSF are ok with non-Free game assets (and other non-functional data). [0] They single out documentation specifically, saying that documentation should be Free despite that it's non-functional. [1] See also [2]. [0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... (under Non-functional Data) [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#extension https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#exte...
numpad0 4y ago
I think he just reinvented F2P. Or looking at something similar to its spirit. Many modern competition games like VALORANT or PUBG are free-beer with paid food, built on free-beer semi open engines like UE4, and are also streamed free-beer on Twitch or YouTube. And kids are moving towards F2P from paid games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty franchise, because the former category is free(-beer). The former is also startin in to surpass the latter in quality. It’s “just” a matter of turning free-beer into free speech, and I think it could well happen as an inevitability, just not in a quarter or two.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I don't think it will happen. The engines might be free speech, part of game play too. But the tens or hundreds of thousands of hours spend unified assets is much harder thing to reach. And where the value really is.
AndrewOMartin 4y ago
Gamers includes people who play Doom. It's reasonable to think a few of those players will ask "Why does this have from the 90s have such an excellent, creative and enjoyable scene when tons of games since have been forgotten?" The answer, at least partially, lies in free tools, engines, and community content.
- simonh 4y ago
  The only reason the engine can be free nowadays is that it has near zero commercial value to the IP owners. If the lesson is that for a libre game to survive and prosper at the mass market level being worthless is an important enabling factor, that’s not a great conclusion to come to. Anyway Doom has this great community around it not just because the tools are free, thought that’s a an important enabling factor, but due to its cultural significance to gamers and games developers.
  - pilaf 4y ago
    id Software has a history of releasing the source code to their engines ~4 years after their initial commercial release: Doom released in 1993, its engine was open-sourced in 1997 (4 years). Quake released in 1996, its engine was OSS'd in 1999 (3 years). Quake II released in 1997, OSS'd in 2001 (4 years). Quake III released in 1999, OSS'd in 2005 (6 years). Sure, in most those cases they were at least 2 generations of their own tech ahead when releasing source code, but considering how they were at the cutting edge of game development at the time, arguably those engines still held considerable value at the time and far from worthless.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Or that it is pretty good game and has the brand. The variants by my understanding aren't so different from it in those aspects, but they don't have similar scene think of Hexen and Heretic. And then the third party titles, how many remember or play those?
deknos 4y ago
you laugh until you get old and the games of your youth do not work anymore because of missing libraries on linux, if there was a linux port. i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert. (UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a hassle with the 32bit libs)
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  FWIW UT2004 works fine under Wine (GOG version) here.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    UT2004 has native Linux version. I would expect that to still work well. The Windows version does, so there should be no need for Wine at all.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      I wouldn't because the Linux UT2004 binary is very old and aside from glibc, X11 and perhaps a couple of other libraries, the Linux userland doesn't really have much of a culture for ABI stability preservation. There are certainly ways to run Linux UT2004 binary in modern Linux but it'd be way more effort than running the Windows binary under Wine.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  I get my Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena kicks from Xonotic. The online community is small, but every day there's at least one DM server with some extremely good players in it. Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Xonotic is the shit!
matheusmoreira 4y ago
I can imagine a world where people reimplement game engines as free software, rendering the corporation's proprietary code outdated and irrelevant. Example: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw
prmoustache 4y ago
I never had to use gcc or git to poay hedgewars or any other free game.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
reverius42 4y ago
This was literally me as a late teenager. Anyone remember IVAN (Iter Vehemens Ad Necem)? Battle for Wesnoth? (I'm guessing the latter may still be around...)
jokoon 4y ago
Shouldn't it be possible to sell a game while making it open source at the same time? I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright. I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity.
- account42 4y ago
  The idTech model is to open source the code (after a couple of years) but keep the content non-free so you still need to buy the game from the original creator even once someone else creates a better version of the code. This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.
throwaway693 4y ago
I used to laugh at RMS but reading more about him is shocking to say the least. Just check the story he wrote in 1997 to make a point https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html . Basically he foresaw people will not be able to own books. He is a genius who *really* does not care about money. That makes all the difference. Very rare to find people with this trait. To top it off he is relentless in his cause. Think if there is any one who can meet these standards. Very few.

by waplot 4y ago

christophilus 4y ago

I’m a gamer. Given a choice between two games of similar quality, I’d choose the free / hackable one every time. There are tens of us, I tell you.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

Just because it isn't realistic in today's AAA world doesn't mean the man is wrong. As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Stallman is not right as a matter of principle. His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale. It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him. But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith. To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.
- car_analogy 4y ago
  > Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. ..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem? > To most of the population there is zero difference between the two. Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    As a programmer, the number of times a project's closed-source nature has prevented me from fixing a problem I had as a user is... one. The number of times I've availed myself of the open-source code of a project to fix a problem I had as a user is... zero--and that includes the projects I was a maintainer of! Both of these numbers are dwarfed by the number of times being closed-source hasn't prevented me from fixing a problem (as it turns out that reverse-engineering a file format is often an effective solution that rarely needs source code). So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard. There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem. [1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  To expand on car_analogy's point: you're ignoring second-order effects. Look at the avalanche of user-hostile nonsense that has become the norm in non-Free software. Much of it is incompatible with the FOSS model. * Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that. * Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state * Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed * Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security * Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics * Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox) * edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption * For more see [1] If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself. > Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is. This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387866 [1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

rasengan0 4y ago

What a coincidence Today I downloaded a free game and having fun [1] $ colossal-cave-adventure WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

zrm 4y ago

Try it this way: You create a game which is actually good. People want to play it a lot. It costs $0 and becomes popular. It's easy to mod so it gets a big community. And everything gets released on GNU/Linux two months before it gets ported to anything else.

s1291 4y ago
"Free" in Free Software doesn't mean 0$ cost.

orbital-decay 4y ago

Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise. It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. It's already so bad that you practically need a separate machine for many games if you want to run anything remotely resembling a VM on your main one, and it's going to get much worse. (ex. TPM requirement in some games on Win11) And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.

mixologic 4y ago
I feel like free software, and RMS's biggest blind spot is the network, between people, and between computers. Everything is framed and discussed in this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed, or installed software on, to also do something valueable. Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface. Which means, that in order to do anything useful, you need to communicate with some other service that is running software that has access to your data. The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious. Take something as old and as open as IRC. I have absolutely no way of knowing if the server Im connecting to is actually running the software I think it is, unmodified. The only people who have that level of access, have root on the server. Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.
- feanaro 4y ago
  > The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious. How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain. Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet? That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.

jhbadger 4y ago

There are some really addictive games that are open source though. And some of them are quite rightly famous. For example, Nethack. I've played Nethack for countless hours over the course of decades. It's definitely given me more entertainment than 99% of all commercial games that I've bought, and I have it installed on all my computers (and there are even phone versions). https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/ https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/

tjpnz 4y ago
Doom 3 might technically qualify, the source code was released under the GPL years back. The caveat was that you needed the creative assets to play it (although I'm pretty sure it would happily run with custom maps). I especially like this model. You get the source but the people who worked on the game still get paid.
- ddingus 4y ago
  I do too. Romero spoke about this a while back. Several members of the team at ID, Romero included, got started on the Apple ][ computers. Those machines were completely open, software driven everything! I keep one as a reminder of my own roots, and the machine is still fun! (Romero keeps his too, as do many from that time period, but I digress...) The author behind Beagle Brothers software and educational materials was a huge impact on many of us, and ID. They released their code so that others may create and so that their games live on for the people who enjoy playing them. Open matters, and that's why one can play doom on almost everything these days, as one example. It's a great model. What I've enjoyed is seeing the ID team watch what others do, and share in all the fun from a secure position having been well paid, no worries beyond that. And frankly, they can STILL sell those creative assets. People would still buy them.
macns 4y ago
got a 404 error for the linux link: http://nethack.org/v360/ports/download-linux.html http://nethack.org/v360/ports/download-linux.html sudo apt install nethack
4y ago

zeruch 4y ago

"what does stallman think gamers are like?" He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him. And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.

robocat 4y ago
There are plenty of examples where somebody who has influenced the world was an idealist, out of touch with societal norms. RMS has serious faults, but his virtues have an immense value in my opinion. ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.
- watwut 4y ago
  Tho, those unreasonable men also fairly often cause quite a lot of damage to their own causes and to world in general. Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.
  - e3bc54b2 4y ago
    > Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false. This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable. For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.
    - halostatue 4y ago
      Except that Edison didn’t invent the electric light bulb (first invented in 1806). https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-light-bulb/ https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...

atoav 4y ago

I mean many games do have a privacy problem and I can't imagine it will just go on like this.

alkonaut 4y ago
Sure. But let’s postulate that people would rather be monitored 24/7 than play the AAA game from even a a few years ago, and in order to stop playing AAA games and start playing free software, what is the realistic path there? Giving a yearly speech? Being dogmatic doesn’t help here I think. Start from the fact (people must play billion dollar budget games) and work backwards. How can privacy be improved, etc. Saying “solitaire has fewer privacy issues than this AAA game” is like saying “walking is better than driving”. That doesn’t improve cars.
- npteljes 4y ago
  We shouldn't expect one person to solve these issues though, I think. In my opinion it's perfectly valid from him to just point out the problem, or give a recap of the state of things and point out trends. It's up to everyone else to make of it what they will. I personally tested many of the foss games myself, and then pitched the ones to my group when we wanted to play games. Due to me trying them first and work out some kinks beforehand, onboarding was easy and we ended up having a good amount of fun. I also like your train of thought however. Which is why I'm happy to support Steam in their effort with Proton. They surely can't make everyone release a Linux version, so what if Wine could run all of the games instead? I like this idea in general and it also enabled me to not reboot into Windows to play some of my favorites.

Lammy 4y ago

He's right, though, even if his proposal isn't practical. Games/movies/music/etc "justify" the development of DRM technologies that inevitably metastasize in time to further lock down general-purpose computing itself.

nathias 4y ago

You do know most of the current best games were free mods at some point?

ddingus 4y ago

At a minimum, those gamers need to look at the past, and their own future. See, when hardware was more open, I was able to preserve and continue to play the games I enjoy. In fact, I can disassemble them, learn from them, make my own. The gamers of today won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms, if they are playing them at all. This is just one of the many things Stallman is right about. Laughing at him is generally unwise. Ask a bunch of us how we know. Seriously.

lovich 4y ago
>won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.
- ddingus 4y ago
  They will. They will want to share their roots, tell their stories, etc...
- the_af 4y ago
  > "Do they care?" I guarantee you that they will. They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the impossibility of porting it without breaking some law), then they will care.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And then I try one and wonder this looks really ugly. This mechanic is rather annoying, yeah maybe it isn't worth the nostalgia. Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...

danjac 4y ago

Stallman probably thinks the state of the art is "GNU-Penguin-On-A-Sled".

crazypython 4y ago

under the free software philosophy (free SOFTWARE), art assets are allowed to be non-free, but stallman believes the game code itself should be free. considering games rely heavily on art, this model still lets you sell games. Stallman isn't a free culture person

MaxBarraclough 4y ago
To add to this: here's a source confirming the FSF are ok with non-Free game assets (and other non-functional data). [0] They single out documentation specifically, saying that documentation should be Free despite that it's non-functional. [1] See also [2]. [0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... (under Non-functional Data) [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#extension https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#exte...

numpad0 4y ago

I think he just reinvented F2P. Or looking at something similar to its spirit. Many modern competition games like VALORANT or PUBG are free-beer with paid food, built on free-beer semi open engines like UE4, and are also streamed free-beer on Twitch or YouTube. And kids are moving towards F2P from paid games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty franchise, because the former category is free(-beer). The former is also startin in to surpass the latter in quality. It’s “just” a matter of turning free-beer into free speech, and I think it could well happen as an inevitability, just not in a quarter or two.

Ekaros 4y ago
I don't think it will happen. The engines might be free speech, part of game play too. But the tens or hundreds of thousands of hours spend unified assets is much harder thing to reach. And where the value really is.

AndrewOMartin 4y ago

Gamers includes people who play Doom. It's reasonable to think a few of those players will ask "Why does this have from the 90s have such an excellent, creative and enjoyable scene when tons of games since have been forgotten?" The answer, at least partially, lies in free tools, engines, and community content.

simonh 4y ago
The only reason the engine can be free nowadays is that it has near zero commercial value to the IP owners. If the lesson is that for a libre game to survive and prosper at the mass market level being worthless is an important enabling factor, that’s not a great conclusion to come to. Anyway Doom has this great community around it not just because the tools are free, thought that’s a an important enabling factor, but due to its cultural significance to gamers and games developers.
- pilaf 4y ago
  id Software has a history of releasing the source code to their engines ~4 years after their initial commercial release: Doom released in 1993, its engine was open-sourced in 1997 (4 years). Quake released in 1996, its engine was OSS'd in 1999 (3 years). Quake II released in 1997, OSS'd in 2001 (4 years). Quake III released in 1999, OSS'd in 2005 (6 years). Sure, in most those cases they were at least 2 generations of their own tech ahead when releasing source code, but considering how they were at the cutting edge of game development at the time, arguably those engines still held considerable value at the time and far from worthless.
Ekaros 4y ago
Or that it is pretty good game and has the brand. The variants by my understanding aren't so different from it in those aspects, but they don't have similar scene think of Hexen and Heretic. And then the third party titles, how many remember or play those?

deknos 4y ago

you laugh until you get old and the games of your youth do not work anymore because of missing libraries on linux, if there was a linux port. i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert. (UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a hassle with the 32bit libs)

badsectoracula 4y ago
FWIW UT2004 works fine under Wine (GOG version) here.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  UT2004 has native Linux version. I would expect that to still work well. The Windows version does, so there should be no need for Wine at all.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    I wouldn't because the Linux UT2004 binary is very old and aside from glibc, X11 and perhaps a couple of other libraries, the Linux userland doesn't really have much of a culture for ABI stability preservation. There are certainly ways to run Linux UT2004 binary in modern Linux but it'd be way more effort than running the Windows binary under Wine.
raffraffraff 4y ago
I get my Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena kicks from Xonotic. The online community is small, but every day there's at least one DM server with some extremely good players in it. Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Xonotic is the shit!

matheusmoreira 4y ago

I can imagine a world where people reimplement game engines as free software, rendering the corporation's proprietary code outdated and irrelevant. Example: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw

prmoustache 4y ago

I never had to use gcc or git to poay hedgewars or any other free game.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

reverius42 4y ago

This was literally me as a late teenager. Anyone remember IVAN (Iter Vehemens Ad Necem)? Battle for Wesnoth? (I'm guessing the latter may still be around...)

jokoon 4y ago

Shouldn't it be possible to sell a game while making it open source at the same time? I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright. I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity.

account42 4y ago
The idTech model is to open source the code (after a couple of years) but keep the content non-free so you still need to buy the game from the original creator even once someone else creates a better version of the code. This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.

throwaway693 4y ago

I used to laugh at RMS but reading more about him is shocking to say the least. Just check the story he wrote in 1997 to make a point https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html . Basically he foresaw people will not be able to own books. He is a genius who *really* does not care about money. That makes all the difference. Very rare to find people with this trait. To top it off he is relentless in his cause. Think if there is any one who can meet these standards. Very few.