Why couldn't free software activists make a dent on hardware and video games despite having varying degrees of success anywhere else?
All hardware being manufactured is proprietary and very often with backdoors, and 99% of video games are proprietary.
>why didn't free software guys fix hardware
>software guys
>hardware
lol
>why didn't the smart people fix my gaymes
nobody with a job plays or cares about childrens games.
because nobody worth a shit cares enough
Ironically because of their extreme egos. If they had engaged with their users more and listened to their opinions, FOSS would be much more popular.
0 ad was good. Shame their online servers are empty though. After seeing that i woukdnt want to make a foss game myself. All of the work none of the glory.
As for open hardware riscv has been pretty successful.
>glory
The point of doing things for free isn't glory. It's to help society become a better place.
Yeah but dude imagine making an entire game and nobody plays it and it just getsvforgotten and you got nothing out of it
Welcome to indie game dev. The handful of indie games everyone knows are the exception, the vast majority are super-obscure. 0 AD had better luck than most still.
>video games
Because there's no tried-and-true successful business model for FOSS video games. Closest we've got is open-source clients for games with closed-source servers.
>Because there's no tried-and-true successful business model for FOSS video games.
Releasing the source code under a FOSS license is good enough, and it works for a lot of developers. Of course, this requires having the developer using only internal or FLOSS solutions, that's a bit harder to achieve.
What advantage does that offer compared to closed-source development? Community-driven maintenance does not significantly increase sales, but closed source does make IP sale more valuable.
>What advantage does that offer compared to closed-source development?
>Being able to take advantage of the GPL code that other people have maintained and improved over the years has been very satisfying for me. I always argued that we got worthwhile intangible benefits from my policy of releasing the source code to the older games, but with Wolfenstein Classic and DOOM Classic I can now point to significant amounts of labor that I was personally saved. In fact, the products probably never would have existed at all if my only option was to work from the original “dusty deck” source code for the games. If we were even able to find the original code at all. Hooray for open source!
https://web.archive.org/web/20140923021813/http://www.bethblog.com/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/
>Community-driven maintenance does not significantly increase sales
There are games sold nowadays only because fan patches exist.
>but closed source does make IP sale more valuable
Does it? That could have been the case when tech advanced fast, but nowadays most games use the same two engines. Both proprietary, but the point is that the things that sell games are names and assets, not the engine.
yeah lets create our microchip factories, idiot
Video games are entertainment software entirely dependent on creative assets, including music, spoken dialog, 3D models and images which are usually copyrighted because those are several different creative disciplines and many of the free software principles like being forced to give people the source code to your work if you redistribute it are antithetical to making money or even impractical.
How do you deliver the preferred form for making edits to the copylefted work in any of these creative disciplines?
What if they used proprietary software to make them?
Artists of every kind are some of the biggest stuck up arrogant divas you will ever meet and the prospect of giving away your work to anyone who buys a copy of your completed video game so they can mercilessly edit it and make derivative versions from now until forever makes their skin crawl.
I forgot to add, the closest you'll get is artists licensing their work as creative commons ShareAlike-Attribution, the closest equivalent to GPL, CC completely killed any future copyleft ever had by allowing bullshit like NonCommercial and NoDerivatives options in their licenses so misguided artists could use CC but not actually make free cultural works, which is the entire point of CC.
To add to this, a free software game would realistically be just the source code, but most games have their assets and source codes inseperably mixed because they were making a GAME and not a generic engine framework that lets you load proprietary assets from a file not provided in the source code.
And then, what do you do with the source code?
It's completely worthless without the assets and nobody will bother making copyleft alternative assets because the glue code in any game is the most inconsequential part of developing video games, it's an afterthought, you can literally pay pajeets to do it, the assets are what's important.
it's called free SOFTWARE foundation for a reason.
There has to be a bigger umbrella for hardware not designed for abuse, yes, but then the entire US govt would make an Nth amendment saying thou shall not be bad goy
Game development requires a lot of work from programmers, artists, and graphic designers. You can't realistically expect people to put in thousands of hours of work and hope they get paid in donations. FOSS is a hobby. Everyone that contributes still has to buy groceries and pay their mortgage.
Its the same reason communism doesn't work. People that work for free aren't very productive.
I dont pay my slaves and you wont beoieve how much cotton they pick
GNU/MGTOW