Good to see this is still moving along. :)

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Quoting: Quote from mirvI'm a little dubious about the stories of Valve pushing for better drivers. AMD started ramping up Linux support quite a bit before Steam came to Linux, and they have helped open source drivers along quite a bit on their own. nVidia, of course, have had their blobs around for quite some time. Plus, on both the nVidia and AMD side, the proprietary drivers share most of the OpenGL codebase between Windows and Linux; typically improvements on one OS benefit the other when it comes to OpenGL.

Indeed, graphics hardware has been improving by leaps and bounds on Linux for years, long before Valve started making overtures.

Just to throw my own molotov into the flames, I have been using radeon cards on Linux since I made the switch full time to Fedora in 2007, and my old Radeon 9200 was one of the best graphics cards I have ever used. Even then it worked out of the box with free in-kernel drivers that required no fuss to use and setup, something that I had come to expect from Linux. Unfortunately that was one of the last cards out of ATI that had free drivers supported by the company, something that used to be the norm before the likes of Matrox and 3DFX went down the toilet and Nvidia started pushing everyone to use non-native blob drivers that did not work with the Linux graphics stack and instead crudely welded their own proprietary implementations on top of a free well integrated system.

Thankfully AMD bought out ATI later that year, and with the help of Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat started their own open source initiative. From there with the help of Intel they helped to further the development of the actual Linux graphics stack that had long since been suffering from atrophy due to a lack of proper commercial support. During the past five years the situation has improved dramatically, and I can now love my Radeon HD 4670 just as much as I did my Radeon 9200. There is still more work that needs to be done, and it is still getting done at an amazingly fast rate, but to credit Nvidia as being a beacon on Linux is to ignore the fact that through their actions they actually helped cripple the Linux graphics stack for almost half a decade.

One last note - when it comes to general hardware support, I have an old HP Scanjet 2300c that we left for dead because the official HP drivers would cripple its use under Windows. I have been using it successfully under Linux for the past few years however because the reversed engineered Linux drivers do not appear to have this issue. Just throwing that out there.

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It was also just released on Desura:
http://www.desura.com/games/gravity-badgers [External Link]

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Indeed, he went to join Occulus full time. Which means there is a good chance that Zenimax will never put out the id Tech 5 source code, but I honestly can not blame Carmark for looking to greener fields. At the very least, we have the Doom 3: BFG source code. 

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Pretty much FutureSuture. Both AMD and especially Intel put a lot of effort into maintaining the free Linux graphics stack, as do some other Linux vendors such as Red Hat and a wide range of community developers, but this still pails in comparison when stacked against the resources made available by AMD and Nvidia when it comes to their own proprietary implementations of of OpenGL and their own graphics drivers. This is why looking into crowdfunding to help give these hard working developers an edge does definitely seem to be very much a good idea.

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Ah, so it is a GameMaker game. That may indeed be the reason that it is kept closed.

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Certainly they have that right, but I still fail to see the advantage for either the consumer or the producer in this case. Keeping it closed might actually harm the games themselves in the long run, as it limits their potential for further distribution and for third-party contributions that could keep the game's themselves alive.

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I really do not see the point in freeware - why keep the game proprietary when you do not even have the oft stated commercial arguments?

The free software gaming community could use people like him. I really do not understand why someone would keep such things proprietary.

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This is interesting. :)

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What is wrong with the venerable Tux as a logo then?

And while I do not necessarily have a problem with a limited testing field, I think your 10/1 figure is way too optimistic in Ubuntu's favour. Especially when taking worldwide Linux usage into account.

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