KubeRoot

If the quote is accurate, he went a step further and put pirated games on the devices. Even if pirating the game is legal in some way (he owns it legitimately so putting a copy is fine or something), sending such devices out to customers then means he’s also distributing pirated games.

That said, somebody in the comments claimed he didn’t distribute games, but rather software that made it easy to pirate games - I don’t know what the precedent is for that being considered illegal, but it does call the original claims into question.

GPL is virally open source, because code using it needs to also be open source.

According to your comment, that doesn’t apply to BSD, so BSD isn’t virally open source, and the claim is true.

The reason some consider this better is because a company can’t fork the code, keeping it private, improving their version with paid workforce while also merging in changes to the original project, thus ending up with a superior version that they can then sell for profit, to no benefit of the opensource version or the people contributing to it.

There’s more reasons, and a whole ideological side, but I think that’s the main practical reason for using copyleft licenses, and a big one.

The good thing is, on Android you can get an APK without root or anything like that, same for installing it, and you can use an emulator (or something like waydroid) to run it on a computer. For cases where the game doesn’t use any more specialized servers, and just uses the app store for authentication, DRM, etc. the situation is no different from PC games with DRM - it’s bypassable, and if done right, will work for all games, not just one.

That said though, it’s very true for multiplayer/always online games, and those are very common on mobile. While it’s possible to reverse engineer and rewrite the servers, for most of them nobody is going to bother. And in the world of aggressively monetized games, developers have an incentive to keep it that way - they can’t make money from players who are still enjoying a game they’ve already squeezed every penny out of.

Sorry, what I mean is, if Valve wasn’t forced to keep it opensource, I think a big factor against would be the extra work

Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.

Well, some games that come to mind are Stellaris, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and I think the upcoming Factorio expansion. And from those, I think it might be possible to buy RimWorld DLC off-steam and install it in a steam copy.

Fun fact, you can check - on steamdb, you can check depots for a game, and see if it has one for a DLC. If it does, then it is downloading extra files for it.

All that said, I wouldn’t say it’s 100% a developer issue. The way I see the accusation, Valve is very comfortable providing convenient libraries for various things, including working with DLC, that only work on their platform, making it hard to release the game elsewhere in the future.

I’m generally fine with that for a simple reason - Steam really does have great features that just work. However, if somebody forced Valve to make features like Steam Input available independent of Steam, it could be a great boon for gaming.

I think the DLC point is the one valid argument, although nontrivial to implement.

How do you think DLC works on DRM-free games works, like GOG? The game is just gonna check if you have the DLC installed, without any real DRM.

The main issue is, this is entirely possible right now for games to do, but it won’t be integrated with steam, and needs to be done by developers themselves. I don’t know how feasible it would be for Steam to realistically do something about it, but it’d definitely be nice if you could buy a game on steam, and later decide you want to buy DLC on another platform and install it onto your steam game.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t… But we have definitive proof ARM is, in the form of actual consumer systems on the market.

If apple is viable for consumers, and apple uses ARM, then ARM is viable for consumers.

Windows and Linux being unfortunately behind is not an argument against ARM being viable, it shows it’s not ready - however, apple was in the same situation before they moved to ARM, so theoretically Microsoft could attempt a similar investment and push towards ARM. Apple’s control over both hardware and software certainly helped them, and went well for them.

That said, maybe it’s a disagreement on terminology. When I say that ARM is viable, I mean that it’s ready to create hardware and software that does what people need it to do. Apple clearly succeeded, now it’s a question of if/when manufacturers start making open hardware and software starts compatibility… Or if maybe another option will succeed instead.

Aren’t the new Apple chips ARM? If they are, then ARM is absolutely in the present, and proven viable for consumers by Apple.

Right, but are the sources all available? You probably wouldn’t want to be using the same build for your one device with different hardware, so the question is, do you have what it takes to put the system together yourself?

Isn’t the secret sauce already available, with the issue being that it’s not adapted to run on a wider range of devices? I had the impression HoloISO was just that, but as a community project - putting in all the work to make it installable on various devices (and work correctly)

If you use a VPN, it doesn’t matter if you use your home network or public wifi… At that point if they track you down to your VPN account, if either you provided personal information, or you used identifiable payment, you could be tracked down. Only difference is, if your VPN keeps certain information, you could be tracked down to the network you connected from, where the public wifi would offer some protection.

VPNs aren’t a magic solution to guarantee privacy, they’re a tool with multiple uses, but using one could decrease your privacy in certain cases.

Cleverly cheesing rules is up to the game master’s discretion, while transforming into a whale sounds like a very reasonable, if overpowered, interaction, the peasant rail gun wouldn’t fly in most campaigns. Not that it makes it any less hilarious.

On the topic of whether or not it’s an emulator, sounds like semantics in the end - fair enough, I disagree but you make a fair point.

That said, in terms of security I think it’s very important to point it out that it isn’t any more secure than running a random Linux executable. In my view, the original comment is advocating for running unknown executables under wine as a security measure, and the further argument is that it’s more secure because most attacks don’t target that.

Sounds like if people rely on that for security, malware will just start targeting that after people get used to assuming it’s safe.

WINE is not safe to run malware in, it’s not a secure sandbox. AFAIK, anything expecting it can do anything a Linux binary can. (Also, not an emulator, it’s in the original name - WINE Is Not an Emulator)