The interwebz have been all atwitter the past month or so with Valve’s announcement of the porting of their Steam gaming service to the
GNU/Linux platform. Many Linux users were thrilled about the
announcement and saw it as a sign that Linux was breaking out of the
small niche culture of hackers to more mainstream folk who just want
to turn there computer on and play a game. To be fair, Linux is not
without a large number of free (both as in beer and as in speech)
games already, but the announcement of a major (are they? I actually
only heard of Valve and Steam because of the Linux announcement)
gaming company moving to the platform as seen by some as legitimizing
the OS to the masses. It certainly gives everyone something to talk
about.

I consider myself more of a pragmatic when it comes to the
philosophical debate surrounding free (for those familiar, the debate
mostly deals with libre software. English has many deficiencies, one
of which is the multiple meanings of the word “free”. In general free
software supporters do support the idea of paying for software and
believe that people should be able to make money off of the software
they write). I think free software is a great ideal to strive for, and
certainly for mission critical software I believe it is important to
have the freedom to view and modify the source code. As I brought up
in vtcli earlier this semester, as an example it is important to have
the freedom to confirm that the incognito mode of your web browser
really is doing what it says it is and not storing or sharing your
browsing information (as an aside to that, I erroneously claimed that
Chrome was open source, it is not, however, it theoretically uses the
same code-base as Chromium, which is open source, and happens to be
the browser I use both when in Linux and OS X. I highly encourage any
users of Chrome to switch to Chromium for the open sourced goodness it
provides, including the ability to confirm that incognito mode really
is incognito). That being said, if there’s a great game I like I am
not terribly concerned with not being able to look at or distribute
the source code, though I certainly would encourage game developers to
release their code under one of the many open source licenses.

It is interesting to note that free software evangelist Richard
Stallman himself isn’t ALL doom and gloom about the news. Though he
certainly isn’t thrilled and encourages people to try out any of the
free games that are available, he does see the move as a possible
motivator for some people to ditch their non-free OSes completely if
gaming had been the only thing holding them back.

However, if you’re going to use these games, you’re better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do. – Richard Stallman

I installed Steam on my Arch Linux install last week and so far have
tried out Bastion, Splice and The World of Goo. All work very well
and have been fun (I had played World of Goo before both on OS X and
Android, it is fun on any platform!). Offically, Arch Linux isn’t
supported but after adding a couple of the libraries and font packages
mentioned on the wiki everything worked like a charm. One down side
that Stallman failed to mention in his response was the fact that it
is much easier for me to spend money on games now that I don’t need to
switch over to OS X to run them.