Quoting: scaineShmerl, how do you feel about the revelation that your anti-DRM stance is so vehemently articulated and you're so immovable in your views that you're actually encouraging pro-DRM behaviour from others?

I'm massively anti-MS and I'd be extremely upset to learn that I was so fanatical about my hatred of them that I was actively encouraging my friends and colleagues to use or defend it more, instead of my intention - from them to discover and hopefully try Ubuntu.

That would encourage some harsh introspection, surely? It did with me. As Tim Minchin so eloquently put it in his Commencement Speech to the University of WA [External Link], you should define yourself by what you love. Don't get dragged down by the things you hate. Even if that means taking a knock or two on the way. God knows, MS knows how to hand out a punch, sadly, but I try not to let those define me. I can vouch that it's a much healthier way to live.

While I tend to agree with your sentiments, I find it weird to be referring to Tim Minchin of all people to endorse it. Don't get me wrong, I love Tim Minchin's stuff--but mainly because the sarcasm is so brilliantly scathing.

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Quoting: namikoShmerl, I say this with the kindest, most honest, and honourable intentions... you're a holier-than-thou arrogant ass who doesn't properly listen to anything people say if they contradict your own opinions. Nobody likes someone who won't listen.

I've been watching this from the sidelines, and although this isn't incorrect, I think it would also be fairly accurate to say others haven't really been engaging with Shmerl's position either. Rather, the underlying framework has been roughly "The kind of opinions Shmerl is putting out are 'fanatical', therefore Shmerl is a 'fanatic', therefore everything Shmerl says must be wrong and it's more important to hector him than to discuss because there's no point treating 'fanatics' with respect."

Shmerl's position is not quite as extreme as some have been characterizing it. Basically, he does agree that we don't know the mental state of Feral decision makers, but claims something along the lines of
(1) Whatever their mental state is, it clearly does not involve making an effort to release DRM-free software, thus that mental state cannot be anti-DRM in the same sense as that of others who do make such an effort.
(2) Anyone who releases things with DRM and makes no obvious effort to release anything without DRM is in effect pro-DRM. Even if somewhere in their hearts, Feral decision makers do prefer DRM-free software, such private virtue is worthless if it has no functional result. So for Shmerl, Feral are pro-DRM in the sense that their deeds are the same as the deeds of a pro-DRM group would be; their mental state is almost irrelevant.
(3) Since they won't tell us their mental state, leaving nothing except their functional results as a guide, and their functional results are identical to those of a pro-DRM group, but not identical to those of an anti-DRM group, he thinks it reasonable to treat and describe them as if their mental state matched their actions.

Martin Luther King made roughly the same argument about US "liberals" who were not themselves pro-segregation but resisted the civil rights movement on the basis that it "rocked the boat" and so forth; he considered them almost more of a problem than the actual racists.

The arguments against describing Feral as "pro-DRM" are also compelling. They come down to
(A) We don't know their mental state, so it could be anti-DRM or at least not actively pro-DRM.
(B) There are known, and perhaps unknown, barriers to publishing with GOG, with GOG under Linux in specific, and to some extent to publishing ported games DRM-free at all. It is plausible that Feral may merely not be anti-DRM enough to outweigh these barriers.
(C) We like Feral because they port lots of good games to Linux so we want to give them the benefit of the doubt on moral issues. This is basically an emotional argument, but not less important for that; it can be restated in a more cynical political form--ignoring imperfections in one's allies for the sake of the major objective is an important element of "realpolitik" thinking.

These positions are to some extent talking past each other. Arguments (A) and (B) are arguments about Feral's internal state, which don't really speak to Shmerl's functionalist position--he doesn't care very much what their internal state is. And argument (C) is based on the idea that Linux advocacy is more important than DRM issues. Shmerl seems to have a different politics which considers DRM issues more important, or at least as important, as Linux advocacy. I myself consider the spread of open source operating systems (mainly Linux just now) the more important strategically, but if I did consider DRM (and the legal issues surrounding it) the more important then someone doing something else good wouldn't cut much ice with me if they're doing DRM bad. So again, that's not something people should be expecting will convince Shmerl.

As to arguments with Shmerl about whether DRM is important at all, or whether Steam's usually-pretty-transparent DRM is still a problem . . . Shmerl isn't stupid and he's clearly looked into this stuff a lot. There really are fairly important political and legal issues involved in DRM, and Shmerl clearly cares more about the principles than the details of one scheme versus another. People who don't know or care about the issues Shmerl has read up on are not going to convince him of anything. (I personally think DRM is a relatively minor symptom of much bigger issues around globalized capitalism, and it's not going to get better unless the global trade and "intellectual property" regime are changed in a big way. But that doesn't mean nobody should care about it.)

So you'll just have to agree to disagree. This expectation that all of you dogpiling on Shmerl and not really coming to grips with his position just naturally should have got him to shut up and see how wrong he is, is a delusion.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'm not trying to offend anyone (for once ;) ), I am just

bragging.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Adamfx990Its a shame publishers favour it despite GOG being the far-more consumer-friendly platform.

Oh well now - that totally depends on how you define "user friendly". One of my major arguments for Steam is precisely that it by far the most user friendly alternative, both in regards to the cloud storage of save-games (where that feature is utilised), the unified, cross platform chat feature with friends, and especially in regards to patching. It's all integrated in one client, one framework.

To claim this is not user-friendly is - if I am to be a bit blunt - really quite fanatic from the anti-drm camp. It is exactly what it is - very user friendly. That's the challenge GOG needs to tackle.

While I personally am only mildly annoyed by DRM, I think this post is doing an apples/oranges thing. Adamfx990 said "consumer-friendly", not "user-friendly". You then went and talked about "user-friendly". The terms are distinct. To go to absurd extremes--you could have a platform which featured a telepathic AI which read my mind and instantly downloaded for me any games which I had formed the clear intention to buy, and instantly started a game I wanted to play as soon as I had decided to play it (first cleanly shutting down any other programs I would have wanted to shut down, saving documents etc exactly how I would have done it) and generally responded to my every wish when it came to games--BUT the terms of use included a clause where the company gets to drain my bank account if I ever think of a unicorn. I put it to you that this would be very user-friendly, but not consumer-friendly. One might even argue that corporate AIs reading my mind is inherently not consumer-friendly.
DRM by its nature is not consumer-friendly . . . even if the platform running the DRM is user-friendly.

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Quoting: elmapulandroid indeed has an highter marketshare, but most of the money comes from the iOS market.
making money for iOS is more profitable than for android unfourtunatelly.

Wait, what? How does that work?! I did a quick google--Android is currently at like six times iOS market share. So like, do iphone users pay six times as much for games, or play six times as many games per capita? Or do the "stores" on Android phones take a cut so massive that game publishers only get 1/6th as much money per game?
None of this seems very plausible. I can see iphone users, probably more prosperous than Android users on average (both individually and considering that wealthier countries buy more iphones), paying and playing somewhat more each. But enough to outweigh the massive difference in numbers? I'm finding that frankly hard to believe.

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I believe what Eike is getting at is that there are cases in which free speech creates actual harm. There are always edge cases--the main point of free speech is to protect expression of political opinions in disagreement with either the authorities or the majority of the citizens.
But stray from politics and there are always necessary limits; a naive extension of free speech absolutism about political expression to other realms just doesn't work. Examples of speech that nobody ever worries about criminalizing: Speech intended to seduce minors, speech in the service of fraud (eg phishing), false advertising . . . speech rights can come into conflict with other rights. The question is always just where to draw the lines, not whether there are any. Personally, I've found for instance that well moderated discussion lists which draw some lines are way better than "anything goes" lists because while in theory "anything goes" allows more freedom of speech, in practice what it allows is intimidation and the tactical use of offensiveness to drive away people who aren't megacombative. Given that, it could be argued that in largely declining to draw any lines, Valve are copping out, failing to protect other things, as much as they are protecting speech.

But it's all about the specifics. I don't really see the need to put a lot of limits to "speech" in the case of offensive computer games. There are very few games I see as posing a huge issue offensiveness-wise, and those few are probably covered by Steam's "trolling" category. Everything else might cause someone who stumbled upon it with tender sensibilities some mild shock, but that's about the least important reason for limiting speech and just not good enough IMO. Further, most games that could be a problem are only offensive if they are pushed at a customer against their will. But those games aren't going to be--the headline games you just see on the front page aren't like that (unless you can't handle the basic computer game foundation that ultra-violence is OK, but then you should maybe go play scrabble), and the "recommended" games are generally only going to show "offensive" content of types your history suggests interest in. So for the most part, if you want to be offended by a game you're going to have to search for it. In which case, your problem--if someone actively goes looking for things to be offended by, they can live with what they get.

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Quoting: elmapulthat is one of the reasons why we have games with constant updates nowadays and all mobile games tend to follow this trend, even if someone manage to reverse enginering the game to pirate it, it takes time and when that happens, they update the game with new features and maybe an new drm scheme, the pirated version is always fighting to keep being updated so the margin for profit of the crackers or margin of enjoyment of pirates is reduced.

So wait, you're saying that pirates are responsible for game companies releasing updates and new features for games? I never realized pirates were so awesome!

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Quoting: edenistIconoclasts

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Arguably those open source attributes could apply equally well to polytheism. But it's certainly an appropriate joke for someone who wants "iconoclasts".

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Quoting: Lakorta

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: shigutso

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThat's a good idea, but my hope is that such functionality should be made official and implemented within Wine itself.
After all, Wine's biggest problem is that is simply doesn't "just work". There's always some fiddling around required.

Not quite... all software from this page Just Works (tm):
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&sTitle=Browse+Applications&iappVersion-ratingOp0=5&sappVersion-ratingData0=Platinum&sOrderBy=appName&bAscending=true [External Link]

Well, no. My understanding is, Platinum means it works perfectly if you set the fiddly stuff correctly, not that you can ignore the fiddly stuff. In this discussion at least, I think people are using Just Works to mean you just click something and it installs properly and happens, rather than having to figure out how to configure it first.
There is probably some Platinum stuff that Just Works in that second sense as well, but plenty that doesn't. So things like this, and PlayonLinux and so on, have always been welcome initiatives and I really hope at some point one becomes really solid--achieves critical mass so most stuff is there, and is easily maintainable so it doesn't rot.

Definition of the Wine Platinum ranking: "Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation"
Gold is the one you described: "Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration"

I stand corrected . . . partially. Presumably this means you don't need to download anything, but there's a lot of potential not-so-"special" configuration in an "out-of-the-box Wine installation". There's all these settings on tabs--which Windows version, which this, which that, and I tend to have no clue which of them matter for any given application.

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Surviving Mars sure beats the alternative (failing to survive Mars).

Never hire a Linux-using cleaning lady. Obviously, she doesn't do Windows.

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