Why do companies make proprietary software and operating systems at all? Because they think it will make them the most money. Why is Steam proprietary? Why is Valve keeping secrets from their users? They could do the ethical thing and make it Free Software.
Steam is proprietary because they want to make money, they aren’t making the operating system from scratch, their goal is to sell stuff on the steam store. Why are they using linux instead of BSD for this, if you think that they have some other scheme? I’m against proprietary software, but the fact is, this extremely optional proprietary software for exclusively gaming is the reason linux is going to get users, a shitload of work done, and will be a usable operating system for anyone. If you don’t like steam, just don’t install it, and no proprietary software will hurt you, and you won’t ever need to install it.
Making proprietary software is already unethical by itself, because users can’t control it. They already do other malicious things like restrict their users with DRM. I’m glad that Valve, Microsoft and other companies contribute to Free Software. They deserve to be praised for this, but it shouldn’t distract us from the evil things they do, which we should criticize. Why can’t we praise Valve for the good things and criticize them for the bad things?
Because you’re criticising them for steamos, which is not proprietary, except for the steam client itself. Criticise the steam client, not steamos.
Steam is part of SteamOS, so I criticize both.
Steam is a single piece of software put upon a completely FOSS operating system, steamos is just immutable arch linux. You can even uninstall steam.
For me personally it doesn’t matter, because I will never use such system. But I want other people to have freedom, I want to live in a free society. For that to happen we must destroy proprietary software, not include it in our distros and pretend that nothing is wrong. I don’t want to see people spied on, restricted by DRM and abused in other ways. That’s wrong, so we have to talk about it and show people that it doesn’t have to be like this.
They do have freedom, they can easily uninstall steam, and steam doesn’t have control over their system because the entire operating system is FOSS, they just have the steam client, which is a completely optional extension and can’t be used for harm when it’s closed. It being proprietary is undoubtedly a bad thing, but that doesn’t make steamos bad, that just makes steam itself bad.
If your goal is to get as many people using as much FOSS software as possible, steam is your ally. It’s what’s getting people to switch to linux in huge numbers, it will push open source forward, not backwards. Your thinking is far too black and white. If steam didn’t exist, and all these developers weren’t working on linux, I wouldn’t even be a linux user, and MANY MANY others would never consider using linux. Because of valves work, linux is usable for an entire massive additional group of people. The same is not even a little true for, say, microsoft, who only help linux in a way that doesn’t harm windows.