alt Hacker NewsI love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
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Valve is not building all this Linux Compatibility out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to avoid being shutdown by Microsoft, who effectively had a monopoly on the OS people used to play games.
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
I mean you're completely correct.
But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.
So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.
Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.