Valve will never say “You know what, we are going to go this direction, market be damned. Follow us if you want to be cool” and proceed to introduce a new graphics API. Don’t get me wrong, we needed one, but the current state of graphics “drivers” sucks. Here comes Valve: “Hey bro, I heard graphics apis suck and are bifurcated by platform, here’s a wrapper that wraps them all into an API you probably already use.” (Initial version of their DX9->OpenGL bridge).

Years later, Valve again: “You know, we just kept going on that thing we told you about, here’s a full fledged x86 win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to patch the kernel but they were receptive.” Who does this? No one. Not a single company does this. They all have ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is patching to make things better for the sake of making “the ecosystem” better. Apple: “We have the best products” yet those products aren’t helping the compute ecosystem. Microsoft: “We have AI” yet those products are still being worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much every creative out there. Valve: “We just want to play, make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to make better games, and not write more code than we have to. Our business is games, not code”.

I might get some flak for this, but Meta is pretty big contributor to open source projects. The amount of bugs and features that they work on that are not used in their own products is quite staggering. Their open source projects are very embracing of the community.

Google on the other hand...

Meta is doing things for Meta. Yes, it helps the greater ecosystem but they have problems no one else has outside of Google and Amazon and a few foreign players. Presto, React, etc are things they needed and decided to open source. Valve needed something at went TO the source. There’s a huge difference. The few tools Meta has released for Linux were things that were important to them at that scale. btrfs, etc. While one could argue Valve did it for Valve, the sheer impact it has on small to medium sized studios is undeniable. Not having to rewrite your engine and just compile with a -lproton is wizardry. SteamOS forced graphics card manufacturers to start including drivers. GNU community being what it is, they reverse engineered it and upgraded Mesa. I’d love to see Facebook include something like making Oculus open source. React isn’t a fair comparison either because it’s a singular path architecture. There’s really only one way, the React way. If they wanted to be serious about improving the web, they would have brought the legacy along and made jsx a web standard for browsers to support natively.

Google, isn’t the same Google. Eric Schmidt is from my area of the world but advertising poisoned the company (one would argue, gave it a monetary value). Like Napster, Google was designed with good intentions in the beginning. That’s why it beat Excite, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Bing, AskJeeves, etc was because its usefulness at searching AND ranking.

All the FAANGs contribute to open source. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m saying Valve does it not just for them but for everyone. With the only hope that Gabe can get HL3 running on a CoreBoot Linux Handheld because console royalties suck.

My main point is that Meta works on issues to support the community much more than other companies, especially Google. Even when those issues don't directly contribute to Meta products itself.

Sure it is self-serving in the sense that they do get a lot out of the community as well, but I don't feel that super min-maxing of resource allocation on their open source projects.

There is no good company, they are all just profit-maximizing paperclip machines - they just put different weights behind the public opinion on them. E.g. Nike will put up a BLM logo not because they care, but because based on their calculations, it brings in more money. Some oil or logistics company won’t, because the average Joe doesn’t even know about them, and another company looking to minimize costs in general don’t decide on their partners based on that.

In Valve’s case, it pays them to have this “good guy” look - some other stores try different strategies, but overall we really should never put personalities behind companies. They all are lawnmowers.

People need to understand this I buy several ETFs. I dont give a crap about the companies each etf is composed of. And I care less about how good or bad the company is with their environment, society or whatnot.

The only thing I care about my set of ETFs is how profitable they are. If one of them stops giving me profits, I'll sell it, contributing to de downward trend of the etf and its underlying stocks.

Social, environmental or other aspects do not play in capitalism.

Valve operates quite differently from publicly traded companies that must see infinite growth to appease the investors.

It is important to take these things into account when deciding who to buy things from because we need to put pressure on them to do good things