On the controversies of Humble, Canonical and Team Meat

Well now, can interesting things stop appearing when I am asleep please!

On USC and Team Meat's Super Meat Boy
It seems Canonical have done a bit of a boo-boo here in the way of selling Super Meat Boy without Team Meat's permission and not paying them for it either.
I point you to this post on Edmund's (Team Meat) formspring where a user asks about the availability issues of Buinding of Isaac (Not directly a Team Meat game but by one of the guys) on the Ubuntu Software Centre:

QuoteYou said the game was rejected by the UbuntuSC guys, how comes that with the Humble Bundle 7 they claim "We're sorry that Binding of Issac [...] are not available. [...] the authors of Binding of Issac declined to make their game available and we respect"

And Ed's response:

QuoteThey are just trying to save face. they rejected isaac a while ago because its content "wasnt a good fit for the Ubuntu store" then changed their tune once they found out how popular it was and that it was a part of the HIB.

but since they are going out of their way to try and avoid the fact that they rejected isaac, ill also make public the 2nd reason why isaac isnt in their store.

Last year Ubuntu added Super Meat Boy to their store without our written permission and sold it for a full year without paying us. we didnt find this out till a few months ago and had to contact them directly about it in order to get our payment.... i dont trust or respect their actions and wont be working with them ever again.

i was trying to be cool about it but if they want to publicly state that i declined their offer to sell Isaac in their store without context to why.. then ill go public with my VERY valid reasons.

feel free to re-post this message or link this to any one who might be misinformed, im not a fan of being made to look like an asshole when my reasons are quite valid.

So the USC was selling and not paying all without permission.

The problem I have with this is that it isn't the first time a game on Humble Bundle has had issues, Steel Storm developer had a bad experience being in a Bundle (see my interview with the developer for confirmation) and his game was for sale on Humble store without his permission as well (see here about humble store where motorsep in the comments wasn't happy).
Although guys from Humble did come here and clear it up for the developer that time around.

So could it have been part of their contract with Humble Bundle that the games go on the USC and Team Meat didn't know? Apparently Ed was aware of this earlier and did not react to it so he is not void of blame but still Canonical should not have assumed anything and just put it up.

I personally think all parties share blame in that.

Tommy from Team Meat and Linux
This is nothing to do with the above but since original article is about Team Meat I want to just highlight this as well.

The second problem I have is that Tommy (1 part of Team Meat) has been very vocal about Linux in the past with comments from them such as:

QuoteWe're never doing Linux because that's dumb. I don't care what anybody says, nobody plays games on Linux.

That quote is from an old podcast from RoboAwesome.

and

This is from a podcast they did that I can't seem to get a hold of (source link) so he doesn't care about Linux or open source:

QuoteNo one gets the source. I don't care.

Movie references then later

QuoteNo, fuck that. The source belongs to me, alright. So open source, no way. Linux, Linux can fuck off for all I care.

Should we be supporting people like that?

Let us not forget Tommy doesn't care about security either when they linked their mysql connection information to Super Meat Boy (source here) and didn't care when someone pulled them up on it to help them secure it:

QuoteYou are not showing me anything I don't already know.

Not massive issue as you couldn't delete entries but to have that kind of attitude towards a helpful customer...

Just be aware the Linux versions aren't done by either of them but by Humble as well and here may be the reason why it's not in-house porting:

QuoteBut Linux... I can't wait for some Linux programmer guy to e-mail me and say "I'll port this for free", because I already have the e-mail already written that I'm going to send back to him, and basically tell him to fuck off, indefinitely.

Another quote from Tommy. Even though eventually they let icculus port Super Meat Boy for the Humble Bundle...

I have a real problem with people like that, I understand people can change their minds (I have reached out to him via twitter to see if he still thinks this way) but those comments are over the top. Just be aware all the "bad" comments are Tommy not Edmund.

What do you think? I just hope he regrets those comments and thinks a little more highly of Linux nowadays.

Article updated to separate the issues and for links about the Steel Storm issues.

I will try to be more neutral in future. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.