Since games are almost always "non-free" according to Stallman...

Since games are almost always "non-free" according to Stallman, is it safe to say that DRM-free video games are okay enough to play?

Other urls found in this thread:

gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html
gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Hacker
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Stupid question thread is over there.

>is it safe to say that DRM-free video games are okay enough to play?
OpenTTD is an example of a game that is FLOSS but allow you to use DRM-features (using the old art and music from the original game).

I'd love to see you explain how those features are in any way DRM.

Games are still software

gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

The ability to choose art and music is literally a DRM feature.

You can choose the copyrighted art and music, if you have the files.

How does this restrict you in any way? You can choose any of files in appropriate format you have.

The ability to choose art and music is not a DRM feature.

Why do I want hackers looking at the source of the games I play? It will just be a hacker fest! Look at the cube engine and it's successor! It's a breeding ground for hackers!

because security shouldn't be done through obscurity
If anything, open-sourcing games and their anticheat might as well get the community to fix your game instead of you

>How does this restrict you in any way?
DRM doesn't inherently mean restriction.

DRM means managing content (software, art, ...) that has digital rights (aka copyrights). In this case it means that in order to play the game with original game, you are restricted because it requires you to already own a valid copy of the original game.

gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Hacker

What anti-cheat? If you want a free game you wouldn't allow a 3rd party application to scan your system. And even if the anti-cheat is free then hackers can learn to bypas the detection. Games have no place in the free world.

>If you want a free game you wouldn't allow a 3rd party application to scan your system
That's not a requirement of free software. Anyway, a good game would allow you to play on servers that doesn't require anti-cheat as well as servers that do.

>And even if the anti-cheat is free then hackers can learn to bypas the detection.
How so?

It is more than possible to require some form of authentication and validation. We rely on TSL and private-public keys all the time, even though their implementations are free as in freedom software. We rely on checksums and other forms of validation all the time, even if the implementations are free as in freedom.

What is emulation?

Any games are okay as much as music or movies because they are art and not utilitarian programs.
Play on a special gaming environment of course so code you are executing can't access stuff it doesn't need to.

I don't understand your rhetorical question. Are you implying that emulating an anti-cheat is impossible to detect?

the new Unreal Tournament is open source and DRM-free
You can play it all you want

This has turned into genuine art, than just purposed reaction images.

The game does not check any rights. It will load any file you will give it. This is not DRM.

By your logic a GPL music player will have DRM because it is capable of playing of OGG file containing a recording of a copyrighted song. You're wrong.

>GPL player that is able to decode DRM/copyright protected encodings
That's clearly a DRM feature, yes.


You are right, if the files doesn't use some form or protected format that prevents you from messing around with them. Not the guy you are responding to btw.

>DRM/copyright protected encodings
>OGG

OGG is a DRM-free format. You're incorrect. The ability to play OGG is not a DRM feature even though there exist copyrioghted songs encoded as OGG.

You have no idea what you're talking about

why is unfree software unethical, but unfree art isn't, according to Richard Stallman?

He thinks unfree art is unethical too, just look at his personal blog. He strongly advocate that artists, musicians, photographers etc use open licenses like creative commons.

But FSF is about software, not art. Free software is different than art, because it requires you to run code on your computer.

>OGG is a DRM-free format.
No shit sherlock. That's why I explicitly stated DRM encoding.

wouldn't op's image imply that his brain is full of hot air and that there's nothing actually in there?

>plays something else than nethack

Or that the electromagnetic field created by neurons firing in a brain that massive literally propels him upwards

Which would be extremely unstable and if he so much as tripped he would risk flipping himself.

If it's less free than Tux Racer, it's bad for you.

Do you think a person with a brain that size would trip accidentally? I bet every motion he makes is carefully planned and thought through.

any multiplayer/scoretable game that ships logic to the client-side that can affect the game are on the losing side in the war against cheating.

Authoritative server or go away

Why would you mention a DRM encoding when I literally said it's OGG, something that is incompatible with DRM?

The same reason you would say "using your logic" and say something completely irrelevant that doesn't even remotely follow the original user's logic.

He said this:
>DRM means managing content (software, art, ...) that has digital rights (aka copyrights).

He said this about game data for TTD, which has no DRM capabilities apart from the fact that the media itself is copyrighted, the same situation as with OGG recording of a copyrighted song.

>which has no DRM capabilities apart from the fact that the media itself is copyrighted
The files use a proprietary file format.

That's like me implementing an MPEG-4 AVC decoder from spec and then saying that MPEG-4 AVC doesn't have any DRM.

>following what a fat fuck says

Just proprietary file format by itself is not DRM. TTDs data files do not have any built-in capabilities for DRM.

How can a file format have DRM capabilities? It's just a file format, ffs, specifying what the bytes at a given position in the file means.

games have to be, by definition, non-free in some way, since if they were entirely FREE then you could just modify the game itself, making it pointless as a game.

By encrypting parts of it. Mate. It's 2017. Come on.

Is Doom pointless as a game?

>partially encrypted files are DRM
The result of Richard (((Stallman))) brainwashing and oversimplification, I guess.

Why would being able to modify the game make it pointless? What about games and game engines that allow mods? Was the original Half Life game pointless as a game because there was a mod (called Counter Strike) that allowed you to change the game itself?

you can modify most pc games

DRM is digital rights/restrictions management. If you want to achieve this effect, you gotta make it impossible for the program to make sense of your data in your file, and the widely accepted way to do this right now is encryption. Not every encrypted file is DRM, not every DRM file is encrypted, but majority of DRM-protected files do use encryption. Is this still too difficult for you to understand?

Software wants to be free. Art doesn't. Games are both software and art. To solve this problem, I propose the following model: games, perhaps one day all games, should consist of free software configured to interactively present nonfree non-software. That is, the engine should be free software; the images, textures, models, audio, text, level design, and sequence of game events should be nonfree and stored as media and text rather than as code.

is openMW free if it's an open source runtime meant to play the (100% viewable and editable) game content of a non-free commercial game with DRM?

>make proprietary file format because your files are only intended to be parsed by you
>someone 20 years after the initial release of the game is able to reverse engineer it

So the minute anyone is able to crack your encryption or reverse engineer something, it's no longer DRM?

There is no encryption nor DRM of any other sort in TTD files.

>no encryption
Not an requirement. Obscure and undocumented file format with big endian byte coding on little endian machines is more than sufficient.

Keep in mind that TTD was created in 1994.

>big endian byte coding on little endian machines
RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

openMW is just an engine and can be used to run free content as well, not just Morrowind

Just because the format is obscure doesn't mean it's DRM. The format needs to have some built-in capabilities to specify which users/user groups have access to content and which don't. If you use encryption, you can enforce those restrictions, if you don't, you expect the program that reads the file to honor those restrictions, but without them, it's not DRM, it's just an obscure file format.

>which users have access to content
Anyone who has a valid copy of TTD, obviously.

>who has a valid copy of TTD
Information about that is not contained in TTD data files.

Enjoy your freedom to play what you want and enjoy it. You don't have to do exactly as RMS says, even when you respect him and agree with some or most of his free software ideology. As an example, you may use exclusively free software for your computing on a PC and play nonfree games on a console if you want. Extremism is bad for you.

You're missing the point of RMS then. For users, he only recommend that you use free software (and refuse to use non-free software). Developers, on the other hand, are considered unethical for requiring their users to pass on their rights/freedoms by using the software.

I don't miss the point of RMS, you miss the point of what I wrote.

It honestly baffles me how someone as retarded as you is able to use a browser.

>Games are both software and art.
No you faggot, games are just software.

>draw a picture
>make the picture move if someone pushes a button
voila something that is both art and a game
fuckKIN OWNED