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Only because the owners of Solaris, HP-UX, AIX decided to outsource part of their UNIX development costs to Linux on one side, while others decided they wanted a free beer POSIX implementation to avoid paying for UNIX.

Except gaming culture is all about IP, something that FOSS don't seem to grasp on their quest for freedom über alles.




Video games are a particularly interesting subsection of software in the context of free software.

Broadly speaking video games are an expression of software and multimedia solely to be used for consumption, and intended to be consumed exclusively within the canonical form presented by it’s developer.

In that way IP is very important, because often there’s more than just the investment in underlying game engine and third party middleware involved; it’s a combination of artwork, audio, video, bespoke scripting, and architecture, to make a whole work. It could be reasonably argued that those pieces should be aggressively defended to ensure the investment is not wasted as these pieces may be of limited utility outside of the complete whole.

I’m certainly all for increased transparency into the inner workings of this package. But it’s an interesting topic and I don’t know enough to even form an opinion on where I think the correct answer lies.




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