Quoting: beniwtv

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI disagree. What you don't own is the copyright. What FOSS software licenses license, set conditions on (or rather, mainly explicitly remove default conditions from), is the copyright. When you buy a game, a copy of the game IS your personal property. You do not hold the copyright so you don't have a right to copy it.
It's true that software companies have been trying hard to make the situation ambiguous and fuzz the law with their EULAs and so forth, but in most countries if it came down to a court case it would turn out that the purchaser of a thing owns it, even if it's a digital thing.

But that's exactly what is said! :)

You don't own the copyright, you don't own the work. You may own the physical copy the work is on though, but that still does not make you own the work. You own a license to use the work (described in the license / EULA).

And FOSS licenses do not remove copyright. They just make some exemptions to it, see:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html [External Link]

Copyright isn't just about "copying" the work.

I think you are having a fundamental misunderstanding, based perhaps on the currency of the deliberately misleading term "intellectual property". Let's take it away from digital for a second, because the lack of a physical thing tends to confuse people. If I buy a book, like go into a bookstore, pick up a paperback, give a store clerk some money in return for the book and leave the store with the book, I own the book. I can do almost anything I want with the book; I can shred it, I can lend it to a friend and so on. I cannot legally bludgeon someone to death with it, but that isn't illegal because I don't own the book, it is illegal because it's murder. Another thing I can't do is publish it. That is not because I don't own that book, the one I paid money for, it is because just as murdering someone violates criminal law, violating an author's copyright violates copyright law. You could say the author in some sense "owns" "the work", but the author does not own the copy I bought. If the author showed up on my doorstep and wanted my copy, I could say no. If they took it, that would be theft, theft of my property. Note that if I published the book that would not be theft, it would be violation of copyright.

If I buy a game, I also own a copy. I paid money for that copy and the situation was framed as "buying" it, so it is mine. The fact that the copy is digital does not in itself change this. It does make certain legal uses impractical, or their legality difficult to verify, since it can be hard to distinguish between moving a file and copying it, and it does make it possible for the seller to include some practical barriers (such as DRM) to actually treating it as your property. But none of this makes a thing you bought not a thing you legally own.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Julius

Quoting: GuestCloud gaming will never become a thing. It's just like VR. When people have thousands of dollars worth of computers, people won't tolerate latency, and fiber is not really a reality even in the oh-so advanced North America and Europe.

Cloud gaming is mainly a drive to expand the market to the millions of people out there who either can't effort a gaming PC, or decided since they don't play very often that it is not worth it to buy a fast enough PC. For both groups a cheap streaming flatrate for games that works "good enough" is definitely interesting.

First, a cheap streaming flat rate for all games does not seem to be on offer. Rather, what we're discussing is you buy a game, and then you access it via the "cloud" instead of actually downloading it, and presumably you pay a subscription fee for that because hosting costs money. Second, those millions of people you are pointing to are precisely the people who are likely to have either lousy internet because they're in countries where the internet infrastructure is lousy, or lousy internet because their internet providers are predatory and they can't afford a good plan and so they have usage caps which would be crippling for such a service.

A cheap streaming flat rate for all games might be attractive to many consumers, but how do the game companies make money? What's their incentive to hand the rights to do this over for what would have to be a pittance? I don't think it would be practical.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: beniwtv

Quoting: NanobangI'm no fan of "the" cloud in general as it continues the trend of further eroding control of what otherwise would be one's personal property.

Just quickly want to chime in here: Games/software are not your personal property. You may own a physical medium the game/software is on though, which is your property. But you still need a license to use that copy.

So, games and software are licensed. Even FOSS software. Otherwise, you would own the right to them, which you do not.

I get what you wanted to say here, though. And I agree, when owning a physical copy without DRM probably nobody is gonna bother you in the future, to take it away or prevent you from playing it.

I disagree. What you don't own is the copyright. What FOSS software licenses license, set conditions on (or rather, mainly explicitly remove default conditions from), is the copyright. When you buy a game, a copy of the game IS your personal property. You do not hold the copyright so you don't have a right to copy it.
It's true that software companies have been trying hard to make the situation ambiguous and fuzz the law with their EULAs and so forth, but in most countries if it came down to a court case it would turn out that the purchaser of a thing owns it, even if it's a digital thing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

On one hand, I find Liam's speculation plausible. Valve might indeed have some ideas in this direction.

On the other, like many here, for reasons they have described, I am not personally wild about the idea of playing games that are "in the cloud" instead of on my computer.

On the gripping hand, I don't think streaming games is the future, at least not the very near future. People have pointed out that in many places broadband is not so broad--and frankly, the big provider companies mostly don't seem interested in investing a bunch of money to improve this. They're all just extracting profits from networks (phone, cable TV) that pre-existed the internet. Even where it's good, hardcore gamers are paranoid about latency. Some people do have concerns about the privacy and "ownership" aspects of the cloud. But above all, people are cheap; we've seen over and over and over again how software companies are just creaming their pants at the ideas of software as a service so they can charge ongoing subscription fees, and we've seen over and over and over again their dreams of endless gravy trains die as they find out people just aren't willing to pay.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI have a question: The descriptions says "via OpenGL and Direct3D". So, does/can/should Vulkan relate to this in any way?

Vulkan support was added in 2.0.6, their description is probably just outdated.

Excellent! Thank you.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I have a question: The descriptions says "via OpenGL and Direct3D". So, does/can/should Vulkan relate to this in any way?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: DJVikingFor them it is all about the money.

That's the sad part. The original intention of Electronic Arts (and the name was carefully chosen) was to acknowledge and foster the creativity of its developers, at a time when even admitting there were real people making videogames was a rarity*. Modern EA is basically the diametric opposite of what Hawkins set it up to be.

*Of course, the founding of Activision is a similar story. And it went the same way.

Both EA and Activision (and many more) . . . It's almost as if there were some sort of economic system pushing people to go that way.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

My eyesight must be going. I could have sworn I just saw a headline saying Electronic Arts was doing something interesting with Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: jens

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: ShmerlThe last remaining milestone for it now is Mesa landing transform feedback patches.

And for a wealthy few, inclusion in the 410 drivers. :D

I would guess that those* few, including me, have to wait for a new short-term drivers version to appear. The 410 driver is a long term driver replacing the 390 series. I don't think that this (410) version will receive such a big feature update. But you never know ;)

* should it be "these" instead of "those" in proper English?

No, I don't think so. The "including me" bit sort of introduces a context shift, new information--up to that point you're still talking as if third person. If you wanted to convey that information without the "including me", you'd say "we few", as in "we happy few". Very Shakespearian. :wink:

"These" wouldn't really apply whichever way. The difference between "these" and "those" is subtle, having to do with, ah, immediacy more than anything else ("these" being the ones in front of me, as opposed to "those" over there across the room), but they're both third person. "Those of us" is a weird exception, but it only works in certain formations . . . "Those of us who (bla bla)" and like that.

Thanks a lot too, that should really help to remember the differences in the future.

PS: I really like reading your posts. Please keep you wordiness :). I'm really glad to see that there are still lots of people that can tell a coherent story with more than 140 characters.

Well, thank you very much.
I remember being flabbergasted when Twitter first came out and was popular, and I was like, "But I have email, and it already lets me use as many characters as I want! Why would anyone accept such a horrible limit?" I didn't get it. I sort of see the point of all the follow-y stuff now. But I'd still kind of like to see an anti-Twitter that enforces a minimum post-length.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quake Champions . . . for some horrible reason this sent me onto a train of thought: There should be a game, maybe a series of games, about heroic mushrooms. Quake Champignons, Eternal Champignons, Deathrace Champignons, Ultimate Arena Champignons and so forth.

View this comment - View article - View full comments