Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration - Arch-dev-public - lists.archlinux.org
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We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

    • @[email protected]English
      -5•3 months ago

      I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

      Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•3 months ago

              While I disagree with the other commenter’s approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.

              There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.

                • @[email protected]English
                  1•3 months ago

                  like Microsoft with Apple in 1997

                  https://wccftech.com/microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-27-years-ago-today-on-august-6/

                  Google with Mozilla today

                  That’s funny because this is the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting. This is not helping their competition, this is paying another company hundreds of million dollars to be anticompetitive against their competition. They paid Mozilla (and dozens of others) to be the default search engine. Its the exact anticompetitive behavior that caused them to be legally classified as a monopoly.

                  Google has multiple ventures: advertising, search engine, email, web browser, cloud storage, cloud infrastructure, etc.

                  I’m not saying they don’t get any other benefit from paying Mozilla. I’m saying that one of the reasons Google shovels money in their direction is to stop regulators from having a reason to take a closer look at Chrome’s dominance.

                  In terms of browser engines, we have: Blink (Chromium), WebKit2 (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox). WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices, which leaves Blink and Gecko as the only two browser engines available on Windows and Linux. If Mozilla went bankrupt and stopped developing Gecko, Google’s Blink engine would have no competition on non-Apple platforms, which would invite some regulatory scrutiny.

                  • AatubeOP
                    2•3 months ago

                    WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices

                    No it’s not. In fact, GNOME’s default browser uses WebKit, which is also FOSS since it was forked from the LGPL KHTML.

            • @[email protected]English
              -8•3 months ago

              They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.

              And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you’re in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.

      • AatubeOP
        5•3 months ago

        Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users’ game libraries.

          • AatubeOP
            3•3 months ago

            No.

            Anyone is free to access purchases given the user chooses to give that info, they just don’t. Skill izzue

      • @[email protected]English
        4•3 months ago

        Lock-in != Monopoly.

        The fact that you can’t transfer your purchases […] to other platforms

        This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.

        It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn’t buy from their store isn’t a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.

        Also, it’s not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.

        • @[email protected]English
          -1•3 months ago

          Lock-in != Monopoly

          They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.