Steam

[Killer 11]

Would it be actually possible to make OpenTTD available on Steam? It wouldn't be the first free game released on it. It would potentially increase the playerbase even more and should remove some load from the download servers, not to mention autoupdate would be easy to do on it.

Of course I have no idea what kind of stuff you have to do to make it available there. It might cost too much to be useful.

[Rubidium]

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=48943

(At the moment at page #2 of the OpenTTD suggestions sub forum)

[Killer 11]

I fail... Anyways I'll go ahead and inquire them about Section E and would they be willing to add an exception if someone wanted to distribute open source software trough it.

[Gremnon]

Somehow I'm not optimistic about that, but feel free to ask. It might be interesting to see what their take on the situation is.

[Killer 11]

Ok email sent, now we wait.

[ABCRic]

Section E of Steam's Subscriber Agreement seems to be conflicting with OpenTTD's license. Steam says you may not copy/reproduce/modify whatever is accessible via Steam whereas OpenTTD's license grants you the right to copy/reproduce/modify as long as you follow some rules (distributing the source).

As a result of that I'd say adding it to Steam is a big no-no.

Even then, I've not found a single Open Source game in Steam's list of games or an Open Source category. Which makes it quite likely that Open Source games aren't meant to be on Steam's system.

But I thought Alien Swarm was open source?

Ok email sent, now we wait.

We're gonna have to wait some time, though.
Everything that's 'Customer Support' and 'Games' is set by default to take loads of time

[Terkhen]

The source code of Alien Swarm is freely available, but this does not mean that the source code is released under an open source license.

[Killer 11]

Zero replies so far. I'll wait a bit more and then I'll try some different emails.

EDIT:

Downloading the SDK to check out the source code and licensing.
It might very well be GPL as anyone who gets steam can get this sdk with source code even if he has no games in it.

EDIT2:

No license in the sdk, though some sites refer to it as GPL...

[Killer 11]

Oh and I think I know how the existence of Alien Swarm source code doesn't break the steam user license thing. The license states that you cannot modify or backwards engineer the code and so on. With the exception of an SDK. So Alien Swarm source code is just included into the SDK and because of that the prohibition of modification is no longer valid. I see no problem with OpenTTD doing that. You release OpenTTD and then SDK which is actually the source code.

I don't really see how it could clash with GPL that way, afterall it would be freely available and you could do whatever you want with it.

[dihedral]

why is it so important to get OpenTTD in Steam?

[belugas]

It is VITAL!
They have not shipped DIESEL yet, so you do indeed need STEAM to get the game running.
Of course, every knows that COAL is now passé

[Gremnon]

Very funny, Belugas.
Some people seem to think it's important to so we get more users, and in my cynical view, more people whining and complaining on the forums.
I don't see the point, myself.