To hell with Mono and the .Net it rode in on.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Nel

Quoting: Mountain Man"Personally, I think these sorts of contracts do no good, and I am not a fan of them. I am surprised such a contract is even legal!"

Why should they be illegal? If an employer says, "Here are the terms you must agree to before we'll hire you," and the employee signs on the dotted line anyway then that's on them. Trendy Entertainment is perfectly within its right to enforce a contract that both parties willingly agreed to.

ROFL

Just one sentence from Noam Chomsky:
The idea of "free contract" between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Unless someone is holding a gun to his head, a prospective employee is under no compulsion to sign a contract he doesn't agree with.

That seems almost the exact inverse of what, when TheBoss said it, your rejoinder was "You're right, that is a stupid example". This is a ludicrous claim, why do I see it so often? Of course it's not the case that there is no such thing as compulsion that doesn't consist of holding a gun to the head. There are many kinds and degrees of compulsion. And it's certainly the case that overall, in gaming companies, people tend to need jobs much more than companies need any given employee, and this differential in power is often used to insist on crap working conditions and nasty contracts. If the power dynamic were different, so would the contracts be. And indeed, every so often you get a superstar programmer who is in great demand, and is well enough off not to really need a job at all, and whose contracts, surprise surprise, are very different. The notion that contracts are, ever really, something happening in some hypothetical magical neutral space where everyone is freed of all coercion is laughable.
This is one reason why it's important for there to be some kind of outside social arbiter (such as, although not necessarily limited to, the state) imposing some limits on how unfair contracts are allowed to be, how much power imbalance is allowed to be brought to bear.

As to this particular case, I think I dislike everyone involved. Stieglitz sounds like a jerk, given the way he seems to have treated people he bossed. Trendy sound like creeps who were probably just fine with Stieglitz's management style until it blew up on them and they had to shuffle things around to save face, and their contract is BS. Even some of the employees . . . even if Stieglitz was treating them like crap, was whining to the media the best action to take? I have my doubts. But dislike Stieglitz personally though I may (given current information at hand--maybe he's a great guy and the people who worked under him were indulging in horrible calumnies), I'd rather see this blow up in Trendy's face because abusing vicious contracts is a broader problem whereas Stieglitz is just one particular dude.

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Saw the headline, "Banished Linux port" and all I could think was "What?! This is an outrage! Why did they banish the Linux port?"

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Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis has been around for bloody ages but it seems like it's moving faster lately.

They sorted crowdfunding question for them and thus got additional revenue.

Ah, that would explain it. Clever.

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Quoting: KimyrielleThis is one of the very few actually commercial quality OSS game projects and I am not sure if "very few" actually means "the only one" (I can't think of a second one right now). I hope they will get it done one day. Looks very good.

Battle for Wesnoth?

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This has been around for bloody ages but it seems like it's moving faster lately.

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Quoting: Mountain ManIt's about time Stardock started showing us some love. They said they would bring GalCiv 3 to Linux but obviously never did.

Yeah. I'm kind of surprised actually--when I looked into it, because GalCiv are totally my kind of games, it seemed like Stardock was a very Windows-centric, DirectX kind of shop. If even they are starting to come around that could be kind of a good omen.

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Quoting: LinasSo what is the recommended way to use Optimus hardware now? Should Bumblebee be replaced by PRIME?

Optimus PRIME, you say?

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Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: Mountain ManNot just AAA titles, we need big players like Blizzard and EA to come aboard. I would especially like to see native Linux builds of Diablo 3, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. I love what companies like Feral and Aspyr have done, and Valve, of course, but they can't do it all.

Both EA and Activision are very greedy. Don't expect them to join Linux world any time soon.

They're not human beings, despite what some U.S. laws might say. :) Therefore, they can't be greedy. They're emotionless corporations, and the driving factor behind corporations is profit. All it takes is an executive with some foresight willing to take a risk on something like Linux, which won't be immediately profitable. In the absence of someone like that, a corporation is going to stick with whatever makes it money.

As Zelox suggested above, it's going to take a lot of patience and hope before Linux will become a competitive gaming platform. Maybe it never will. We just have to wait and support companies that make an effort to sell games for it, but there's little point in having ill feelings toward those companies that choose not to, including Microsoft, because it's not personal at all.

Your analysis is spot-on, but your conclusion IMO is not. There is absolutely a point to having ill feelings towards those companies. They may not be human, but we are--it's easier to boycott and otherwise avoid, counsel people to avoid and so on if we harbour ill feelings towards them. And if we do enough of that stuff, it will cost them profits. And if it costs them profits, then in a totally non-personal fashion they may in the end do what we want. All because of irrational ill feelings. Indeed, I might even claim that that is the point of ill feelings--dislike, anger, and hatred are the mechanisms humans use to successfully apply tit-for-tat type game theory approaches to conflict.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut in that case, you shouldn't be complaining about political correctness...

Of course I can,

Of course you can. Free speech and all, we established that. But just because someone can do something does not mean they are justified in doing it.

Quotebecause the question was asked with the sole purpose of injecting controversy into something that was otherwise completely non controversial.

"into something that was otherwise completely non controversial" . . . well, if you mean that the interviewer didn't ask any other controversial questions, I suppose that's a true statement, but so what? What would your point be? What kind of belief system sees controversy as inherently evil? Shortly ago you were defending your right to be obnoxious about attacking things you identify as "political correctness" on the basis of free speech. Even if you consider controversial speech inherently annoying or offensive (in which case you're forgetting the whole point behind freedom of speech, which is precisely to preserve controversial, political speech, seen as the important baby for whose sake the bathwater of rudeness, obscenity and so on must be grudgingly kept), your right to complain about it is identical to a controversial speaker's right to indulge in it. Trying to have it both ways is a contradiction.

For that matter, controversial is in the eye of the beholder. Many would consider categorical attacks on political correctness themselves "controversial". In which case you should be on your own case for the sin of controversy, while simultaneously defending yourself as exerciser of free speech.

If on the other hand you mean that the question's topic should not have controversy attached to it--well, no. You're wrong about that, and at a bare minimum a lot of people disagree with you in good faith and have serious reasons for doing so. Including but not limited to some of the things I pointed out before, which you have carefully ignored. Let us assume that you, too, have serious reasons for your stance, beyond just "I hate this topic and wish people would shut up about it" (although I have not seen them). If you have serious reasons for thinking things like all-white-characters are just fine, and other people have serious reasons for thinking they are problematic, then that is a situation that calls for argument, discussion, meeting of minds--not for the people who disagree with you to just stop. Which is to say, it is a controversy--it is controversial--and no amount of pretending it somehow shouldn't be will change the fact.

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