There’s a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it’s been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord “if you have any questions”.
Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won’t be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn’t have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What’s wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you’re making supposedly open products in?
In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?
This is an age old discussion. The FSF doesn’t “approve” of Debian because it contains proprietary drivers (which are already in the Linux kernel). Even when Debian didn’t have these drivers by default and you had to go out of your way to download an unofficial version that did have these drivers, that was too much for the FSF. Thing is, in most cases you need those drivers to get your hardware working properly. For instance (and IIRC), the latest WiFi version that has a WiFi card available where the drivers are fully open source is WiFi 4 (back then WiFi N).
There will always be a compromise (setting aside the ID thing on Discord, which is a whole other can of worms and affects open source software as well). Even if you’re running only Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever other open source OS), there are in all likelihood still closed source drivers being used. Or, you decide to limit yourself to WiFi 4 or ethernet connections, for instance. OK, now you don’t have any closed source drivers anymore, yay! Except… The processor and processor architecture your computer is running on isn’t open source. Shit. And in fact, there currently is only one open source processor architecture: RISC-V, but that still has a bit of a ways to go until it’s ready for mass adoption. And even then, I’m sure you’d find something closed source in whatever computer you’d be using. It’s always (at least in the current day and age) a question of how much you can realistically have open source.
The situation with that game definitely seems a little more extreme in the other direction, unfortunately. The question that I’m wondering is: the game is open source, what’s preventing you from compiling it yourself? That way you don’t have to run it through steam. And if there aren’t proper instructions, check the license of the original project, it may just be a violation of that license (since a clear compilation path is practically a part of the source code, since without you can’t compile it and thus use it properly otherwise).