5 years later Valve finally gives Windows compatibility tool Proton a logo

Now that I think of the Nintendo v Emulator lawsuit -- how would this effect Proton ???

If successful could Microsoft launch a lawsuit and say WINE is illegal? as it "Circumvents the intended use-case" ???

No, WINE would be like Google v. Oracle, which was pretty firmly settled in Google's favour, and thus WINE's.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

Sorry to be that guy, but that is really not a good icon for the name.
By the looks of it I would guess hydrogen anion, but never proton.

To be fair, protons don't really look like much of anything. Heck, I think it's hard to even abstractly conceptualize them as looking like much of anything . . . maybe you could represent them as some kind of swirl of three components (the quarks)?

I completely agree.
It is incredibly hard to visualize something that is rather abstract in contrast to things that we can visually observe in daily life. I am not saying, they could have easily done better because there is an easy solution.
But I feel like showing something that is visualizing something completely different is not the right way. They'd better make a nice thing out of the word mark than trying to make up an icon for something that the name isn't describing.

!Captain Proton.

THERE IS 3 RINGS AROUND THE ATOM!!!!!! HALF LIFE 3 BOYS, PROOF!!!!!

Before Halo 1 was owned by Microsoft Studios it was available on MacOS/OSX -- and after Microsoft bought it they pulled the plug on that.

A small correction if I may. The original Mac version of Halo was never released. Microsoft bought Halo and its developer Bungie entirely to prevent the Macintosh platform from ever getting a gaming killer-app - which is totally in line with Microsoft's modus operandi. The Halo FPS that was eventually released (and which did later get a Mac OS X port) isn't the same as the third-person successor to Marathon that was revealed and made such waves originally.

We could probably discuss whether or not that is presently true of Microsoft. Come to think of it when they bought Minecraft I don't remember seeing a non-windows version.

To be absolutely fair, they kept almost all of the non-Microsoft versions of Minecraft available (I believe the exception was the Raspberry Pi Edition, which they pinched the idea for and then ran off to make Education Edition which I believe is only for Windows), and kept making more of them, too.

That said, Microsoft bought Minecraft after its creator talked about releasing it under an open license, and of course, as with preventing the Mac from getting a killer app, they had to prevent open platforms from getting one, too, so nothing has really changed about what they're doing.

Relevant article, also.

Official Valve Proton t-shirt when?

Oh man, I'd buy one for sure.

Same here - I wish they'd bring back the official Valve merchandise store!


Last edited by Pengling on 29 February 2024 at 8:26 am UTC

Alright, but... it’s not a good logo for "Proton", nor for anything actually. It’s absolutely generic and bland and not even accurate.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

No, it seems like ProtonDB just recoloured the React logo. And I just realised, they're not even within the license since they don't give attribution oopsies.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

No, it seems like ProtonDB just recoloured the React logo. And I just realised, they're not even within the license since they don't give attribution oopsies.

Although the license situation there is weird. It says it's Creative Commons, but above that there's also a note saying it "does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain." In which case you can't really license it, Creative Commons or otherwise, although I suppose you could claim it was.
And that's not really surprising--that basic image has been getting used for atom-type-stuff for decades and decades, by everyone from governments to comic books. IIRC, that was the image Doctor Manhattan refused to use in Watchmen.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

No, it seems like ProtonDB just recoloured the React logo. And I just realised, they're not even within the license since they don't give attribution oopsies.

Although the license situation there is weird. It says it's Creative Commons, but above that there's also a note saying it "does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain." In which case you can't really license it, Creative Commons or otherwise, although I suppose you could claim it was.
And that's not really surprising--that basic image has been getting used for atom-type-stuff for decades and decades, by everyone from governments to comic books. IIRC, that was the image Doctor Manhattan refused to use in Watchmen.

I suppose you're right, but when you see super basic things (like fruit, letters etc) clearly trademarked / copyrighted, it's never clear, and of course Wikipedia is also not to be taken on the legal word.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

No, it seems like ProtonDB just recoloured the React logo. And I just realised, they're not even within the license since they don't give attribution oopsies.

well i hope react dont react to then, lol.
but if they do we already have some logo to replace then.

The saying comes to mind

"When people show you who they really are, believe them the first time."

I mean, I'm with you 100% on that. The thing is, no matter how much the US government wants to say otherwise, corporations aren't people. Microsoft is not a person. It's a public corporation that functions with one motive: profit. Now you can argue against the very concept of capitalism. I myself am very much opposed to it, as was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and pretty much anyone else who cared about human rights. But at the end of the day, you can't look at corporations as people with good or evil motives because they have neither. The only motive is profit.

Sometimes that works in our favor. Sometimes it doesn't. Right now, Microsoft's profit motive is not antagonistic to free and open source software. That could certain change in the future. I was just speaking of the present situation.

But at the end of the day, you can't look at corporations as people with good or evil motives because they have neither. The only motive is profit.

For the purpose of judging motivations, you should look at corporations as the people who own and lead them. They're the ones with agency. A corporation is just an abstract concept.

The fact that these people are more or less expected to seek profit without concern for ethics (at least as far as they can get away with) is irrelevant. If an action would be unethical for a person, it's unethical for a corporation.

But at the end of the day, you can't look at corporations as people with good or evil motives because they have neither. The only motive is profit.

For the purpose of judging motivations, you should look at corporations as the people who own and lead them. They're the ones with agency. A corporation is just an abstract concept.

The fact that these people are more or less expected to seek profit without concern for ethics (at least as far as they can get away with) is irrelevant. If an action would be unethical for a person, it's unethical for a corporation.

True, but my conversation wasn't about current actions, it was about motivations for possible future actions. It was speculation about what Microsoft will do. You could argue that you can predict future actions based on past actions, but the people running the company aren't the same people who ran it back when they were clearly attacking Linux. My argument isn't that they're good now. It's just that we don't know what they're going to do. Microsoft did a fine job of spreading FUD back in the day. I don't see any reason why we need to do the same now. They are not our teachers.

so... the logo on protonDB was not the logo for proton? lol

No, it seems like ProtonDB just recoloured the React logo. And I just realised, they're not even within the license since they don't give attribution oopsies.

Although the license situation there is weird. It says it's Creative Commons, but above that there's also a note saying it "does not meet the threshold of originality needed for copyright protection, and is therefore in the public domain." In which case you can't really license it, Creative Commons or otherwise, although I suppose you could claim it was.
And that's not really surprising--that basic image has been getting used for atom-type-stuff for decades and decades, by everyone from governments to comic books. IIRC, that was the image Doctor Manhattan refused to use in Watchmen.

Wikipedia's licenses for images and other assets are occasionally way wrong. I won't give the exact example here, but they distribute a PDF for a book they claim is in the public domain because it did not come with a copyright notice (many years before the 1989 amendment). In actuality, the person who scanned it missed the copyright page or removed it themselves. I contacted them personally; they told me their hardcover copy did have the copyright notice.

In the case of the React logo, it's not the copyright you need to watch out for. It's the trademark. I seriously doubt ProtonDB is not infringing on Facebook's trademark over the React logo. But regardless, it seems to be licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0, not a generic CC 1.0 license. Facebook certainly doesn't believe they have no rights to the logo: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/12570#issuecomment-411130246

I would be careful about trusting Wikipedia as the ultimate authority on what the copyright for an asset is...how can the logo be both a CC license and public domain? The only CC license that's true for is CC-0, but the React logo was never licensed under that.