FreeGameDev

Oh, it's just been a couple of topics mentioning the subject. So let's make a shame list that we can just point people to.

• GitHub
• GitLab.com or self-hosted GitLab with default settings
• Steam
• SourceForge
• Itch.io
• GOG???
• Transifex
• Discord

What else?

Would be nice to justify each of the entries in one or two sentences.

I know why some of these are problematic (but not all):

• GitHub: Important site functionality is broken without executing their JavaScript. That alone is not a problem, but the problem is that the JavaScript is proprietary. This means that even by visiting this site, you executed proprietary software (unless you disabled JavaScript). (See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html) Got an “F” grate in the GNU Ethical Repository Guidelines. The grade is old but the complaints are still valid today. But the site is at least partially usable without executing any JS, but you have to jump through hoops. Ugly, but it could be worse.
• Steam: Proprietary software. But that's not the only problem. Lyberta summed it up perfectly: https://libre-gaming.net/articles/steam.html (but this post is old, maybe it needs updating)
• SourceForge: Got an “F” grate in the GNU Ethical Repository Guidelines, however, the grade is old and the site changed significantly, they also had a change of owner. Maybe this needs a re-evaluation.
• Transifex: Depends heavily on proprietary JavaScript, and it's very obfuscated, too. When disabling JavaScript, this site is completely broken

I can't say anything about Itch.io and GOG, but I suppose it has something to do with JavaScript. Please elaborate.

I'd like to add Discourse (webforum software) to the list. OK, this looks like free software to me, but I absolutely hate this forum software, to the point that I avoid forums using Discourse completely. It has such terrible usability. Infinite scrolling. That alone is a show stopper to me, but there are many other problems (I could go on forever). Discourse heavily uses JavaScript which is designed screw with my browser. This is bad, webmasters, stop doing this crap! Stop dictating me how I should use my browser, thank you very much! And if you disable JavaScript, Discourse just breaks down. You can still theoretically browse the posts, but it looks very, very broken. I wanted to report this critical bug, but it seems they don't even accept bug reports.


Some unproblematic servers for the use cases exists (I list only live running servers):

• Code hosting: https://notabug.org/ https://savannah.nongnu.org/ https://repo.or.cz/
• Translating: https://hosted.weblate.org
• Game distribution: ??? (does “GNU/Linux package manager” count? )

Why do you expend so much energy decrying this in an increasingly smaller and smaller echo-chamber? No one here seems to disagree on principle, after all those topics are close to the core fundamental ideas behind this community.

It is however tedious to read through pages and pages of the same general arguments directed at yet another (in the grand theme of things) minor offender that seemingly happens to still have some significance in your day to day life. If you don't like them and their technology don't use their services!

Furthermore, this community doesn't have the reach to convince others by shriekingly denouncing proprietary web-services, and in fact this kind of negativism is probably driving away people that are not in your ingroup already anyways.

Try to be proactive and work on libre alternatives to these services instead of just complaining about them

Well, for starters, a lot of game projects on this very community are using at least one of the aforementioned services. So this thread is 100% legit, even if in-group.

If even this community has a hard time from moving away from GitHub and other proprietary services, then who will?

If you don't like them and their technology don't use their services!

It's not that simple. There is no meaningful choice here. I don't get to choose what services other projects use. Usually as an outsider, you have to pick the websites they have chosen.
If a project chooses to use a proprietary or broken service as the main communication platform, and I refuse to use it, I will be missing out on crucial information. So either I have to basically give up and join them anyways or refuse to use the service and miss out on a lot of information because I have to fall back to secondary channels. It's a lose-lose situation.

As for me, I still use GitHub, but with JS disabled. It still kinda sorta works for discussion. I stopped using Transifex, which forces me to go the more complicated way of building patches and sending them to the devs and hoping they did not update the translations in the meanwhile. It works, but it's tedious.

This might sound like nitpicking to some, but I think it's about being consistent and it IS relevant for projects that themselves pride as being “free software” or “open source”. You have to admit the ultimate irony that a huge amount of free software projects are hosted on GitHub, which itself is far from being free software.

Besides, there is always the danger that all these gratis services might screw you over big time. But that's probably a general problem with all web services that you do not own, not specific to libre vs proprietary. I hope you all keep backups of your data.

I know for some projects moving is hard, but my point is, I wish that more people especially in our community would at least try.

Try to be proactive and work on libre alternatives to these services instead of just complaining about them

Dude! I just named a few websites. Do they all suck so much you don't even recognize them? XD

I totally agree it's absolutely crucial to have libre software for core use cases, but there are already some choices available. But they're pointless if nobody uses them.
Maybe we could do better, but at least it's a start.

I don't disagree with you, but complaining about it and "shaming" others for using these services is counter productive.

Wuzzy {l Wrote}:Besides, there is always the danger that all these gratis services might screw you over big time. But that's probably a general problem with all web services that you do not own, not specific to libre vs proprietary.

Exactly, all these services have their advantages and disadvantages, and you always pay for the service in one way or the other. However paramount should be to not allow them to lock you in and we should strive to help others avoid/get off these services by offering alternatives and building bridges off these services instead of shaming and blaming them.

I don't have mental health to be polite and I rely on other people to soften the pill for outsiders.

I don't like linux users who frequently use steam.
Unfortunately games nowadays especially steam attract others just by graphics. but if you wanna create game with amazing graphics you need to put lots of money to it. And people get brainwashed like oh this game has crap graphics not playing.

I have no idea if people on this forum are linux users, but i assume so. And i often noticed that people out there often will tell me what to do and what to think. I feel like on internet but especially in reality, people that are around me. Saying stuff to people who play games like i don't use steam they don't care.
If i say i dont go on youtube nobody understands as well... But still other linux users and other youtubers tell me to go on youtube or steam because that's what they do, so i have to do it too... I think it's crazy and if i say no then that will mean it's offensive.
Me and my real mate played this game runescape together, and we have been in touch for long time but then he told me he plays Counter Strike Global Offensive and i played few days with him and it didn't have good impact on my brain. We started being toxic and piss each other off. (And by the way my steam account gonna be deleted in about 20 days and i don't care that i 'paid' for games on it. I don't wanna use it). This is steam and valve impact. But when my friend uses windows 10 and play these steam games he just doesn't understand and people lots of people don't understand why you don't like steam.

My philosphy is: If creator of product is rich but customer is poor then it's shit product. I think steam is shit product, and i never completed any half life game in my life. Steam creates those absorbing online games so they can gather data about it's users.
And then i go on some linux forum and i see steam amazing woo!!! amazing!!! i go read linux format magazine and somebody who's editor there says: hail to lord gaben
And i am like really, what am i reading...

Sourceforge has only advertisements that put me off going there.
github is m$ now so i don't really go on github and usually if i see that something is available only on github i don't go there
itch.io needs google recaptcha to be filled and it's requiried to log in. 3rd party software like google recaptcha to be able to use the platform?? No thanks!!
gog.com is like steam and it screws people for money. Owner of this website is another young multibillionaire.
I go to CeX entertainment and i buy 2 parts of a game for one pound while one part of this game is 7,50 pounds on gog.
Old game morrowind 3 15 pounds on gog. Who the hell pays that mch money for a file you can easily get from torrents? How come downloading games from torrents is illegal but doing the same stuff from gog.com or steam is completely legal and ok??
I have no idea what's transifex

Now i am waiting for some policemen or other guys coming to my doors because i say i dont like steam and google something is wrong with me i need to go to prison.

I don't have mental health to be polite and I rely on other people to soften the pill for outsiders.

I think you're hurting whatever side you're on with that attitude, not helping.

Radicals don't convince people to change their minds. Moderates do.

onpon4 {l Wrote}:I think you're hurting whatever side you're on with that attitude, not helping.

Radicals don't convince people to change their minds. Moderates do.

It's hard being moderate when entire world constantly tries to kill you for your gender identity, sexual orientation, political views and a lot of other stuff. Our enemies are committing genocide on a global scale, there's no time to be moderate.

cynicfm {l Wrote}:Now i am waiting for some policemen or other guys coming to my doors because i say i dont like steam and google something is wrong with me i need to go to prison.

Hold on your horses. I understand how you feel. Calm down a bit and slowly start going off the grid. Install ad blocker, uMatrix, start using Tor. You will be relatively safe.

No one's tried to kill me.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that you need a to be a moderate. I'm only suggesting that alienating moderates may hurt the causes you want to support.

As a part of not willing to be customer of google, i don't really go on youtube, haven't visited this website for months . So please no links to youtube, as i am not gonna click on them.
I currently use icecat gnu browser, newest version has tor plugin, however i have no idea how to setup tor in my laptop, i currently downloaded it to be honest.

Lyberta {l Wrote}:

onpon4 {l Wrote}:I think you're hurting whatever side you're on with that attitude, not helping.

Radicals don't convince people to change their minds. Moderates do.

It's hard being moderate when entire world constantly tries to kill you for your gender identity, sexual orientation, political views and a lot of other stuff. Our enemies are committing genocide on a global scale, there's no time to be moderate.

cynicfm {l Wrote}:Now i am waiting for some policemen or other guys coming to my doors because i say i dont like steam and google something is wrong with me i need to go to prison.

Hold on your horses. I understand how you feel. Calm down a bit and slowly start going off the grid. Install ad blocker, uMatrix, start using Tor. You will be relatively safe.

i downloaded tor i have got it installed but how to configure it I HAVE NO IDEA.
newest gnu icecat has some tor plugin but i need to have tor enabled first in my system
but screw this because i hardly go on internet nowadays. Perhaps few forums and e-mail that's it.

Sorry that is a bit hard for you. On Linux by default Tor daemon will be open on 9050 port. You need to make sure that Firefox uses 127.0.0.1:9050 as proxy. It is in Edit->Preferences->General->Network Proxy.

oh ok i got it . just had some bug with user thing but i typed command sudo -u tor tor and got it now and newest icecat has tor plugin and i got it running now too .

Thanks!!

@Lyberta
I have got icecat 60.3 on my laptop but i decided to install firefox-developer-edition today. I installed ublock, privacybadger, httpseverywhere and umatrix + TorSwitch. I have got tor installed. I noticed that i am not able to type a password on twitter.com during login and similar with ebay it wont display anything under password tab.
And also i configured my torrent client to use 9050 sock5 or something like this and localhost. However i also play this game old school runescape and i use open source client for it called runelite. I make a connection using java -jar file.jar command however i wonder how can i use tor for it?? Troule with this jagex is 100% owned by some chinese corp so probably data about me goes to china a lot.
I have no idea how to make every connection everywhere on my laptop to use tor. It seems like atm only browser and torrent client uses tor but stuff like playing this runescape game still does use my real ip address.

Thanks

You can prepend "torify" to the command you are trying to execute such as "torify java whatever".

You might be interested in https://www.whonix.org/ if you want to ensure that everything is using Tor, always.

Okay, thank you.
Well that was really hard decision but i had to do this. I played this game runescape for many years, even maxed woodcutting and fletching, made some friends there but... i am simply not happy with what they do to this game: every login on their website needs google recaptcha to be filled = fail.
They associate this game a lot with twitch.tv which is owned by another multibillionairie corp amazon.
100% stock of british company that created runescape called jagex is owned by chinese iron ore mining company.

Today i have applied for account deletion in this game. Last week they deleted my steam account after 30 days of waiting where i had games that i paid for every counter strike skyrim gta iv witcher 1 and 2. Also two weeks ago my blizzard account with diablo 3 has been deleted and i paid 35 pounds for digital version. I have gone off windows, decided to stop using search engines in general (not just google every search engine). I havent been using youtube for 2 years now.

These games and stuff consume too much time of mine and every update is a disappointment. People who play these games are dumb. People on forums of this games are dumb too. I decided i wanna start reading real writers and real books, not people who only write about working and content and OP said. and making money.

I am clearing my mind from this crap and yesterday i turned game on called freeciv but i am so used to convenience i fking can't be arsed to read manual it's too much for my brain. Modern games they babe sit you so much like now it's problem for me to read some guides about how to play freeciv. i should start read man pages of linux too!!

I decided to stop playing these games that require being online and focus on better things like reading books, playing those linux free games like freeciv for example or hedgewars, mainly games that teach me something. playing online games was occupying my whole time but it's just not worth it.
I noticed there's this gaming bollocks nowadays you buy computer just to play games. On linux i want to play games as part of using computer not a main thing.

I am happy with those decisions i made cuz i wanna free myself from using corporate services etc.

I still have my runescape account, but I'm taking a break from it. The game is just too buggy, and I'm mostly maxed anyway, so it got boring. I've been filling the time with reading books, playtesting wograld, making maps for wograld, making box forts with my son and then having to clean them up. (for the record, I hate the cleaning up part and wish I didn't have to do it, but I do because I'm still not making any money from wograld, else I wouldn't have to clean up the stupid box forts.) playing a stupid cell phone micropayments game (yeah, it is bad, no way am I buying in game stuff in it, at least it gives me some new game dev ideas and ways to monetize wograld, when I get that far, sooner or later I'll write a post about what is actually good about the game, ideas we can use so free software games stop sucking.)

Jastiv {l Wrote}:I still have my runescape account, but I'm taking a break from it. The game is just too buggy, and I'm mostly maxed anyway, so it got boring. I've been filling the time with reading books, playtesting wograld, making maps for wograld, making box forts with my son and then having to clean them up. (for the record, I hate the cleaning up part and wish I didn't have to do it, but I do because I'm still not making any money from wograld, else I wouldn't have to clean up the stupid box forts.) playing a stupid cell phone micropayments game (yeah, it is bad, no way am I buying in game stuff in it, at least it gives me some new game dev ideas and ways to monetize wograld, when I get that far, sooner or later I'll write a post about what is actually good about the game, ideas we can use so free software games stop sucking.)

yeah i am playing rs3 now more like semi afk mining but are there any nice linux mmorpgs?? something like time killers. or even not mmo but something like singleplayer kind of time wasting and consuming game...
i have plenty for windows but for linux i wonder...
i tried manaworld and standhal or something like this so far...