CLA and copyright assignment are different things. In some jurisdictions copyright assignment is impossible. That was among the clashes European FOSS contributors had with the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallmann in the 1990s and 2000s.

MIT license already allows this, with or without CLA.

That’s why you can also take Microsoft’s MIT code and make proprietary software out of it.

No, Windows has various subsystems. This one is for Linux.

When Windows NT 3.5 launched, it came with subsystems for POSIX, OS/2, and Win32 because in the WinNT world even the Windows frameworks are a subsystem. Disclaimer: I didn’t check if in Win11 this is still the case but I guess so.

I still don’t understand how blocking individual EU countries conforms to the EU single market.

Stupid fucking comment.

I was merely stating in simple words what Apple’s product is and that their customers respond to exactly that. You choice of words shows that a loud fraction of their user base is a cult, though.

People buying Apple products want to be told by Apple what’s allowed. The walled garden is core to Apple’s product philosophy. It’s not like everybody was expecting Apple to be super open and inclusive with anything and then be taken by surprise from the Fortnite situation. Even before they deprecated open standards because their own tech is supposedly evolving faster and are better integrated.

People wanting to play Fortnite on phones can just get a reasonably specced Android phone and install EGS next to Play Store with just a few taps.

At least they disable the monetization features of Brave but making stupid Google Meet such a hard requirement to compromise of all ethics? WTF?

I’m so hyped about machine-generated output from copyrighted data being fine. “No, your honor. I did not pirate a copyrighted film. I distributed a machine-generated re-encoding of a film that is a close approximation but not not the original copyrighted film. As you can see, you honor, the copyright information was stripped, therefore it’s fine.”

Wait, so in all these years that Europeans have been making fun of dumb Americans for having a two party system, and for having no real left wing options, the UK has been basically the same?

Yes, that’s why Europeans make fun of both the UK and its former colony.

There is no doubt. Sony is actually a great example because they were the ones who tried to remove purchases from Discovery. They faced zero legal consequences.

The legal justification is right there in the byline of the article you’ve linked.

Steam and game publishers can always take your games away without prior notice.

Technically: Yes. Legally: Doubtful.

Publishers can choose to no longer run servers but to remove games from the accounts without compensation, would be legal trouble.

When Sony axed Concord, all buyers got a full refund for a reason and that reason isn’t that Sony is such a caring company.

My child is not old enough to read, let alone login and create an account.

“make her an account” does not mean that she should do it on her own.

Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.

So it is a bad thing now that Steam makes new releases more discoverable than the other storefronts that have a larger installed base than Steam?

Microsoft’s store has a close to 100% penetration of home installation of Windows 10 and newer.

Opening Microsoft Store: Boom, top spots for Microsofts properties (Activision Blizzard sale, Minecraft, Candy Crush).

Switching to the Games tab: PC Game Pass, more Activision Blizzard sale, COD Black Ops 6 with a dedicated banner, more Minecraft, more Candy Crush.

Visiting one of Microsoft’s other game stores, Battle.net: 100% Microsoft exclusive. Not just Blizzard games but Doom, Avowed, Sea of Thieves, PC GamePass. That’s unregulated Microsoft on full display. Not a single 3rd party game even available but the rest of the Microsoft catalogue integrated after the takeover of Activision Blizzard.

Compare that to Steam: Huge banner advertising the sale promotion of EA.

Scrolling a bit further down, Microsoft games advertised, some convention for narrative games.

Nobody but Microsoft and Epic are to blame for their huge installed bases not converting to sales of 3rd party games. Mostly advertising their own properties and paid exclusives.

All your emotional outbursts do not change facts.

It’s not about how easy it is to compile

But it is. It is what defines the cost of supporting a platform.

The install base is too low right now.

The installed base of Switch2 is 0% right now.

10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way.

So still far off anything resembling >50% market share on PC. Good to know they’re still not a monopoly.

The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else.

So Valve is not engaging in any anti-competitive behaviour as well as pumping resources into Linux support to break the Windows hegemony? Great!

Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.

Yeah, these people are very strange. I mean, it’s a fact that Microsoft is the convicted monopolist because of the grip Windows has on the industry, the same Microsoft that bought Minecraft, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King to become the world’s single biggest games publisher and their Windows-exclusive PC GamePass is also growing (surely at least partially thanks to Microsoft “continuing to misuse its Windows operating system monopoly” to promote their other services).

And yet, there are people who put the sole Linux supporter in the same corner, as if that company had anything approaching Microsoft’s market power. Not even the EU thought Valve was important enough. Microsoft, Apple, Google, ByteDance, and Meta are Digital Market Gatekeepers, not Valve.

There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway

Except for the fact that their entire technology stack already supports it and making Linux versions of their games is a compilation step away. Their Tencent buddies at One-Notebook would surely make a OneXPlayer with EpicOS. “Comes with Fortnite and get free games each week”.

They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay.

EGS has a massive installed base because of Fortnite.

Do they officially support Linux yet?

Unreal Engine has official Linux support since ages. Unreal Engine running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what movie CGI creators often use these days. It’s a highly lucrative market they’re not going to give up.

Epic Online Services supports Linux as well: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eos-get-started/platform-support (which includes Easy Anti Cheat)

So when Fortnite and Rocket League have no Linux versions, it’s just because of lack of will, not anything technological.

They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming and that means they should lose some market share, though.

So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.

You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.

No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.

I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime.

And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…

There’s no workaround for monpolistic positions

Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.