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Google has a huge opportunity to push forward free and open source gaming with their larger long term strategy as they are abandoning #Stadia (blog.google/products/stadia/me). Instead of giving people back their money and throw the whole platform tech away, they could turn over source code and copyright.

People and ccompanies that invested in this would not be let down and it would make for a wonderful contribution to counter market dominance - and would #empower users. Go Google, do the right thing!

GoogleA message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategyBy Phil Harrison

@NGIZero Are you serious right now? You do know what Google is, right? You do understand what their business model is? I thought NGI/NLnet was purportedly about finding and supporting *alternatives* to surveillance capitalists like Google, Meta, etc., not trying to improve their PR by perpetuating the myth that they’re generally a force for good who sometimes (often) make silly mistakes.

Do better.

@aral Would it or would it not be good to open source a complete platform, and allow its users to determine its course by giving them copyright? Would that not offer people an alternative to Sony and Microsofts dominant gaming platforms?

I think you must have used Etherpad at some point? What is different here? Do you still see that as a Google product? Of course, #Cryptpad is warmly recommended.

@NGIZero “Open Source” for a surveillance capitalist like Google is one or several of four main things:

- The potential to use free labour
- The potential for positive public relations (which, when amplified, will hopefully get people thinking about them as a benevolent philosopher kings instead of the robber barons and people farmers that they are)
- The potential to influence the stack (with tools that function in line with their success criteria)
- The potential to find new talent

@NGIZero … nowhere in the purview of a trillion-dollar multinational corporation, much less a surveillance capitalist, is there the goal of furthering the commons and contributing to the public good.

The sooner we stop pretending they ever had this goal and the sooner institutions that have some level of legitimacy (or at least a claim) in representing “the alternative” stop laundering their legitimacy by perpetuating these myths, the better.

@aral Google did release etherpad which brought about a revolution in collaborative writing, so it might work out. @NGIZero

Aral Balkan

@ArneBab @NGIZero Bless them, they’re such an excellent company. Such a role model. Let’s make sure we encourage all new computer science graduates to apply for jobs there. Not only is the pay great but they just do so much for the world with their open source work.

Also, have you heard, some clueless folks seem to have a vendetta against them and are trying to regulate (basically restrict) them? How horrible. Why would anyone want to harm a company that gifted humanity the likes of etherpad?

@aral I think you are oversimplifying this: They can be an evil company *and* their opensource releases can be useful. There can be people at Google who try to do something good while evil — they try to use their ill-gotten privilege to undo some of the damage. @NGIZero