OK, I'm usually on the side of the people doing the whatever stuff, but I don't think it's just a fondness for Valve that is making me see this as somewhat different.
I mean, they were either selling, or releasing for free, a game that Valve created, owns and is also selling. It does not sound as if you had to get the assets separately from Valve, nor was it intended to play on some platform that the game did not normally run on. They were as far as I can tell distributing the whole game. The fact that they ported it to a different game engine doesn't seem to me to make any difference, any more than selling someone else's book would be OK if you had different binding. If you're going to have copyright at all, this is copyright violation.

(Mind you, I am actually in the long term on the side of "no copyright at all (as such)". But that would require a quite different society with its own ways of compensating creators for their work, and those ways are not in place. Getting rid of copyright while changing nothing else would just make things worse.)

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Quoting: elmapulin other words, companies like valve target the most profitable markets, while smaller companies target the markets that valve isnt interessed yet...

Hmmm . . . one of the markets Valve apparently isn't interested in has quite a bit of profit potential. Presumably this Ayaneo thing will sell in China. I mean, it's a Chinese company.

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Quoting: Cloversheen

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: CybolicI'm for the idea, but the language of "content [...] created with the help of AI tools" might cause issues.

A popular method of using (what's commonly called) AI is for sketching out ideas and getting rapid feedback on them. If for example, a writer puts in a page worth of text and asks the AI to give its feedback on, say, the themes or tone of the text

Really? People trust the feedback of those things? On stuff like themes? That's, um, the word that keeps coming to my head is "pathetic".

Out of curiosity, what would you consider a non-pathetic way to get feedback?

. . . From a sentient being that knows the meaning of the words it uses? Why is this hard?

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Quoting: CybolicI'm for the idea, but the language of "content [...] created with the help of AI tools" might cause issues.

A popular method of using (what's commonly called) AI is for sketching out ideas and getting rapid feedback on them. If for example, a writer puts in a page worth of text and asks the AI to give its feedback on, say, the themes or tone of the text

Really? People trust the feedback of those things? On stuff like themes? That's, um, the word that keeps coming to my head is "pathetic".

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Quoting: CybolicI've said this since the Celine Dion rootkit [External Link] fiasco: rootkits should not be legal and I don't understand how they still are.

Come to that I'd be willing to bet there are laws in at least some countries that if you looked at them in that context you'd think, "Hang on, doesn't this actually break that law?" I mean, there's all these anti-hacker laws, many of them worded in a way their drafters didn't realize was so broad, or just defined weirdly, or both . . . this stuff probably falls afoul of some of them if you take the wording seriously, it's just most law enforcement pretend that's not what the law says because you can't go around putting rich corporations in jail for doing business, even if that business is crime.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestAlso how can you despise Yakuza...

So, after the Fukushima thing, the Yakuza teamed up with the company that owned the reactors to force people they were loansharking to go work at reactor cleanup even though it was a death sentence. Then when they got sick from the radiation, they were laid off so they could go die at home and nobody would record it as having anything to do with work at a reactor. So yeah, that's one thing that might cause a person to despise the Yakuza. As well as nuclear reactor companies.

Meanwhile the Yakuza where launching relief efforts (that the government didn't) when the Earthquake hit Japan in 2011

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE72O6TF/ [External Link]

If you told me Robert Pickton gave lots of money to charity in between his rapes and murders, it would not really make me say "Oh, I guess he's not so bad on balance".

That's just more of the same sort of rhetoric some people used to defend the mafia organizations in Italy and the US. And the triads as well I think. "They took care of their communities." You know, when they weren't doing vicious crime syndicate stuff.

The Yakuza are seen as this romanticized comic book version of the brutal murderers and criminals they actually are. But hey, these games look pretty entertaining.

They do look entertaining. And I myself sometimes enjoy a nice "Rough-hewn but honourable Yakuza guy does improbably noble things while taking care of an orphan girl" manga. I don't confuse it with real life though.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: GuestAlso how can you despise Yakuza...

So, after the Fukushima thing, the Yakuza teamed up with the company that owned the reactors to force people they were loansharking to go work at reactor cleanup even though it was a death sentence. Then when they got sick from the radiation, they were laid off so they could go die at home and nobody would record it as having anything to do with work at a reactor. So yeah, that's one thing that might cause a person to despise the Yakuza. As well as nuclear reactor companies.

Meanwhile the Yakuza where launching relief efforts (that the government didn't) when the Earthquake hit Japan in 2011

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE72O6TF/ [External Link]

If you told me Robert Pickton gave lots of money to charity in between his rapes and murders, it would not really make me say "Oh, I guess he's not so bad on balance".

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Quoting: legluondunetIt would be interesting to know if they pay a fee to Valve to use Steam OS on their device. in this case, the cost of the royalties must be lower than if they used the Windows operating system and they would save the costs of creating their own gaming-oriented operating system, which would explain this surprising decision.

They might pay Valve to help them with it, but fundamentally they shouldn't have to pay anything to just use it. I mean, that's the GPL, right? They can use the source code which Valve has I'm sure made available in compliance with the license. I suppose if Valve really wanted they could refuse to let them call it SteamOS since presumably Valve has that trademarked, but that seems like a stupid and petty and self-foot-shooting thing to do that one might expect of, I dunno, Nintendo but not Valve.

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Quoting: Boldos

Quoting: nebadon2025Is this an official partnership with valve for SteamOS or are they just making their own image and calling it SteamOS? I feel like if there is no official partnering with Valve on this that its probably not going to go as well as it could.

Well I keep thinking: if the device runs on a similar (or almost the same) hardware, would not SteamOS "just run" on it?
If the answer is "yes", then they might not even need to create their own modified image version, right?

I'm ignorant about these things but I would think so. I mean, it would probably need a couple of different drivers, and there might be a tiny bit of input remapping to deal with the different controls, but that doesn't sound like a big deal.

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OK, this quote annoys me:

"No unfortunately not. From a security point of view supporting WINE would be like having a bank vault at the top of Nakatomi Tower then installing a doggy door in it."

Shyeah right, your anti-cheat is like a bank vault at the top of Nakatomi Tower. Also you walk on water and your shit doesn't stink. I'm sure it's been hacked six ways from Sunday, and here he is being all arrogant about it. What a douche.

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