Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?

Why would I care?<p>I understand the point of freedom for some software: say if tomorrow the whole nginx team decides to retire and I nginx is a critical part of my business, I have the option of taking over the maintenance.<p>But games are not like that. Games are entertainment and presumably a short-lived one. I play, I get bored, I move on. The games are also a product of diverse teams: it's not just programmers, but story editors, 2D/3D artists, composers, voice artists etc that create experience, not a tool or platform. Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them? Or may be you want to get your hands on petabytes of data that went into production of Avatar so that you could fix a couple of landscapes?

"My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm."<p>Did rms just admit that proprietary software can theoretically have benefits? What's this world coming to lol

"If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having these games on your computer."<p>I feel like restricting the definition of freedom fairly narrowly goes against the very definition of freedom itself... but then again he's free to do that too.

Just to be clear, when he says "nonfree" he means free as in speech, not free as in beer, right?

I think it's important to add that regardless of whether proprietary games are <i>wrong</i>, he points to two initiatives (Liberated Pixel Cup and the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective) that are promoting and developing free games. Those are worthy of support even by people who many not be convinced that all games should be free. Personally, I think they should be -- games can have backdoors and antifeatures like any other program. They can be used to control the user. Game code is also re-usable in contexts that aren't games, and it has educational value. It has all the problems that locking away knowledge usually does. Game companies have also been some of the most aggressive when it comes to trying to control users.

This is the closest I've seen them come to recognizing that the importance of free software may vary by where it sits in the stack. Think about it... the full stack of applications is a tree, right? A free root node is much more important than a free leaf node.

Related question: wouldn't FOSS ruin competitive online play, by making it impossible for game companies to prevent cheating?

Why is it unethical to sell software, but (I presume) it's ethical to sell food?

Can't wait for Valve on *nix - easy to use - great specials. Resyncable.

Nonfree? Okay.<p>DRM? Groan.<p>But really, who cares, let the user decide. Why does the freeness of the OS have to predicate the distribution, license or otherwise of the software used on it?

This post is open source.

It's up to the end user - if the GNU movement is somehow planning on restricting the ability of the user to use DRM'd software on their own systems, then they've gone completely off the rails.