Are Valve embracing an open Source?

A few rumours have popped up over the interwebs over the last few days indicating that Valve, the forward-thinking software development company headed by Gabe Newell, are going to be doing something quite extroadinary.

A few years ago they released the Steam platform: it’s essentially a content distribution system tailored for selling games direct from the creators to the public. Initially there were problems with bandwidth availability and some other issues, but Valve worked dilligently to solve them. Today, Steam is not just a game-selling platform, it also delivers news, comics, movies and other types of entertaiment media directly to consumers from the publishers. It cuts out a few middle-men and makes software cheaper to buy, which is only a good thing.

Again, Valve may be showing themselves to be forward-thinking. Apparently they’ve been hiring Linux software developers to port Windows games to Linux.

Also, a few other big-name games that are coming to Steam soon have been noted as making available a Linux-compatible version. Namely, the Penny Arcade comic game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Penny Arcade has been closely affiliated with Valve since a few years ago when the comic was featured on the main page of Sources’ Steam application; obviously, the new Penny Arcade game is going to be distributed by Steam.

More notoriously, the upcoming Postal III is also being released on Steam, and will also have a Linux client, according to an interview conducted with Vince Desi, CEO of Running With Scissors, the development company behind the Postal series of games.

The piece de resistance however is this gem which states quite clearly

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

What can we make of that?

We can only hope these rumours, which are apparently bolstered by facts, come to light as truths. I personally only play games available on the Steam platform, and if I could chuck away my Windows installation altogether, it’d be most welcome!

Head over to this thread on the Phoronix forums for the discussion that started it all.