He guy's, Here is a patition to get half life (2) ported to linux.

haha a naive linux half life

What makes you think a petition ever gets anyone anywhere with a software company who knows they will sell millions of copies of their game without the linux port that wouldnt ship anywhere near as many as the windows version?

Money is the way the world runs, and the amount of time and effort (read : money) that would need to be invested for that would not be worthwhile. Stop wasting time with a petition and start contributing to wineX development.

Edit : Lol. I just had a right chuckle at that petition. One of the options is "I believe that the sourcecode to Half Life should be made public." Why in God's earth would Valve wish to do that? There is not one substantial reason for them to do so.

*Sigh* Keep on dreaming.

Ion

Now there's the spirit Ion.....

So if money is the only reason to port a game, and you don't belive that Linux is a viable market, then why has q3, UT, RTCW, NWN and a host of others ported their games natively to linux? Linux is no longer a fad on the desktop. It still may be a small market, but it is not a market to be ignored. Valve made millions off of Coutner-strike. Counter strike was a Mod done by programmers from the half-life community. It would be my humble opinion that there are many, many good if not great programmers that use linux as their main OS. If you want the same kind of mod development and programing talent that brought CS to the masses, then as a company, do you dare ignore linux? I think not.

slight

as much as i am totally addicted to counter-strike, and as much as i would love for counter-strike/half-life be ported to linux, i don't think this online petition is going to do anything...you got the right spirit, but i think something like people just flooding valves mail with requests to port the game, instead of putting your name on some website would be a better way of fighting for cs on linux.

I actually did it the old fashioned way. I mailed Valve a letter. Yes, snail mail, complete with my signature, on DAMN expensive paper too (it even had a watermark). Who knows if anything will come of it, but its at least worth trying.

slight

Well, we can try can't we. What do we have to lose? And besides, why woulden't it work. The point is to make it clear to valve that the linux market is big enough to be made profit of. So why woulden't this work?

Yea, well I saw that typo as well, but I couden't re-edit the subject to spell it right.

He means the petition is naive, silly :P

Still, not a lot to lose is there ?

While I don't agree completely with the rest of your post I too had a chuckle about the comment above in the petition...then I was sad because this person is demanding that Valve's hard work be given away...why?

Basically it should be enough for now that it runs in Linux. Not EVERYTHING has to be free as in beer, the developper has a right to choose the way to license his work...attitudes like that comment will only reflect negatively on game companies (who thank god, are starting to come around and putting out stuff on linux)

Why would giving away the source code to the half-life executable be an issue? Its not as if you are giving the game itself away, only the source to the game engine. The only concern that I can see would be a loss in engine licensing royalties, but I think the the Half-Life (which is after all Quake1 based) engine is far enogh behind in technology that it is no longer attractive as an engine for other game developers.

Just my 2 pennies.

slight

True, that's a good point I didn't take into consideration...but, its still Valve's choice...personally I'd be happy for a closed port (at least to get the ball rolling).

I agree with tcaptain. WHy does every thing have to be open source? Valve has every right to licence there software the way the want to. I would alraidy be very happy if they made a closed source linux port.

Closed port of Half-Life or Half-Life 2?

Half life is way to far into its production cycle to warrent a port, hence the request for the source to be made open, so that someone else can port it if they want.

Half-Life 2 on the other hand has not even begun a production run, meaning that a port is still very much an option..

slight

I am supprised there's so much popular software that doesn't have some sort of Linux port. UT2003 has the port on CD. Even if they don't document it, I want to see them release it. Half Life and the NetZero ZeroPort are the two software packages I wanna see on Linux the most, and those are two software packages I actively use.