this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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One of my paradoxes, im anticapitalist and I'm greeting valve for their work on steamdeck (not an owner) and proton.
That's participate to democratize the use of Linux as a daily OS a lot.
You can be anticapitalist and still agree with certain companies. Especially when those companies are private, and are not beholden to corrupt shareholders. Private companies are significantly more capable of having and sticking to their morals.
They also go down the hole faster once someone with looser ethics takes control.
It's the paradox of the benevolent dictator, sure they can provide fantastic and quick service to their subjects... but as soon as the ruler is no longer benevolent, it's just a dictatorship.
Public shareholders are no more corrupt nor less moral than private shareholders, but all of their incentives and information end up being based on more short-term results. Valve is every bit as driven by money as any other company, but they're thinking long-term, and they believe that there's more money to be made long-term by treating customers better than their competitors do. That means they release open hardware that isn't locked down, unlike what their competitors do. They want to mitigate business risk by decoupling PC gaming from a dependency on Microsoft, and all sorts of very capitalist entities mutually benefit from a healthy, usable Linux ecosystem that they can each make work for their own needs.
Whether or not public shareholders are more or less moral than private shareholders is not really quantifiable, and neither of us can say with certainty that it is true. I certainly agree that that public shareholders often focus on short term results, but it's not true all the time. There are public companies that think long term and private companies that think very short term.
There are, but the incentives put in place by public companies tend to favor short-term results when they're releasing quarterly earnings, something that some big investors have pushed back against for that very reason. Public investors may not be more corrupt either, but they may be less knowledgeable about the harm they're doing when they make changes to the product to get more revenue, like that infamous investor call where someone suggested charging $1 to make Mario jump higher. Microtransactions are clearly a business model that customers are willing to pay for, so it makes sense that person would raise the question, but I doubt that guy plays Mario games in his spare time, because no one who does would suggest that.
Being anti capitalist and being in favor of capitalist companies injecting ressources into projects that benefit everyone is compatible imo. Especially when that company does not ask for anything in return and makes the work open source
Let's give some credit and praise to Codeweavers, the main contributors to WINE, who Valve worked with on Proton.
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/aeikum/2019/8/20/a-year-since-protons-launch
What we hope is for them to continue this approach that is helping both them (detaching from Windows, where they see Microsoft Store as a threat) and the users. Even if in the future there is a chance they might either back down or do less than liked actions, their positive contribution will remain.