Valve is making money on Proton (if indirectly), so they would very quickly get sued for it. It’s not that the copyright owners would want to stop them from distributing the library - just that they’d want a cut of Valve’s massive revenues. A community project, on the other hand, isn’t likely to be able to provide any revenue. So since it’s just redistributing runtimes that are already available for free and the only likely result is the project getting taken down, it’s not really worth doing.
One of them has a lot of money to be sued for patent infringement. There’s no money to extract from a random guy releasing free stuff on GitHub.
It’s not worth going after individuals, and I’m sure codec companies secretly loves it when their format is super popular by end users even if unlicensed (MP3, MPEG 4, HEVC), because more companies want to implement it and those have to pony up the big bucks. If they started going after end users, open formats would very quickly rise and dominate, they don’t want that.
There are licenses that allow distribution for free for personal use, but don’t allow distribution without a contract if it’s connected to you selling content in any way.
How come Valve can’t distribute these libraries but Proton-GE can?
Valve is making money on Proton (if indirectly), so they would very quickly get sued for it. It’s not that the copyright owners would want to stop them from distributing the library - just that they’d want a cut of Valve’s massive revenues. A community project, on the other hand, isn’t likely to be able to provide any revenue. So since it’s just redistributing runtimes that are already available for free and the only likely result is the project getting taken down, it’s not really worth doing.
Might be a licensing thing? So you’re practically pirating those libraries?
That’s my best guess.
One of them has a lot of money to be sued for patent infringement. There’s no money to extract from a random guy releasing free stuff on GitHub.
It’s not worth going after individuals, and I’m sure codec companies secretly loves it when their format is super popular by end users even if unlicensed (MP3, MPEG 4, HEVC), because more companies want to implement it and those have to pony up the big bucks. If they started going after end users, open formats would very quickly rise and dominate, they don’t want that.
There are licenses that allow distribution for free for personal use, but don’t allow distribution without a contract if it’s connected to you selling content in any way.
Ah ok, this makes sense.
Everyone else responding here is essentially making the point that Proton-GE is piracy which I didn’t think would be the case.