Yeah, that statement was a bit naive, but some companies do business ethically, and some throw ethics out the window in pursuit of profits. The latter is basically a requirement for publically traded companies, and still pretty rare among privately owned businesses. I hate to speak in defense of any company but in my opinion valve has been pretty consistently ethical. Don’t take my word for it though, I’m just a random person on the internet, I could have missed some shitty practices.
Anyways my original point was that while of course all businesses are driven by profit, some aren’t driven by it to the exclusion of all else.
Steam comes pretty fuckin close though. Valve has its issues with communication and speed, but since all of its employees are also gamers the company frequently furthers PC gaming in ways they didnt need to because Valve employees just wanted things furthered in that category IE built in modding support, digital games refunds, built in control remapping, steamdeck being a linux machine, etc
The thing is, they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of there heart. They want you money and there own platform so they invest in there customers and Linux.
That’s not a bad thing and having market incentives to do things for the community is very effective.
I hate to break it to you but no company does anything out of the goodness of heart. Its called business
Pretty much, I wouldn’t make such a blanket statement though, non-profit companies exist too
And unfortunately many of those still operate as for-profit companies and extract wealth via administrative fees and executive salaries.
case in point: Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla corporation(the for profit arm of Mozilla organisation) got 7 million dollars of salary in 2022
Yeah, that statement was a bit naive, but some companies do business ethically, and some throw ethics out the window in pursuit of profits. The latter is basically a requirement for publically traded companies, and still pretty rare among privately owned businesses. I hate to speak in defense of any company but in my opinion valve has been pretty consistently ethical. Don’t take my word for it though, I’m just a random person on the internet, I could have missed some shitty practices.
Anyways my original point was that while of course all businesses are driven by profit, some aren’t driven by it to the exclusion of all else.
Steam comes pretty fuckin close though. Valve has its issues with communication and speed, but since all of its employees are also gamers the company frequently furthers PC gaming in ways they didnt need to because Valve employees just wanted things furthered in that category IE built in modding support, digital games refunds, built in control remapping, steamdeck being a linux machine, etc
The thing is, they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of there heart. They want you money and there own platform so they invest in there customers and Linux.
That’s not a bad thing and having market incentives to do things for the community is very effective.