I would be intrested in examples and sources for "They patented it to the brink". The things I came across were (which is a problem for both DX and OpenGL) or the [url=web.archive.org/web/20110810001356/http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Wine-development-stifled-by-software-patent/0,339028227,339188400,00.htm]Borland Exception handling; both are not WINE specific problems but problems for the general open source ecosystem.

At least (while under debate) even in the US APIs can't be copyrighted, also clean room reverse engineering is legal. Additionally, MS was publishing the Win32 and DX API specifications pretty openly out in the past, to late to "close them" now.

Yes, even though MS tried to fight it supporting Oracle. However software patents aren't affected by all that. And assume that MS patents everything they have. That even poses a concern about C#, which they promised not to abuse patents wise. Because of that many people don't want to use it. They never even promised anything like that regarding DirectX, so assume it to be a patent minefield. They might never care about abusing it, but you never know. It's an inherent risk. So proposing it as a preferable way forward is too shortsighted and Carmack really should know better.

Well you certainly have to wonder how they would feel/react if Wine ever came to be a seriously viable alternative to needing a real paid copy of Windows. It's not like a VM where you still need their OS, you'd just get to bypass it all together. That would be a very weird dynamic if it happened, and I have a hard time imagining MS would be supper psyched about it.

Link. Finally, Valve! You can download it, not sure if you can play it yet. Give it a go!

Wheee!

DirectX != OpenGL, Direct3D == OpenGL (approx., with downsides)

OpenGL + OpenAL + SDL + ... == DirectX (maybe, with downsides)

Carmack's view on downsides is irrelevant actually, he stopped working on games already a while ago.

Great news, haven't played that yet.
I wonder if it's DRM free like HL2 and Portal..

Is HL2 available DRM-free? I thought it's Steam only.

DRM-free.
Steam-only.
Yes.

When you've downloaded it, you can zip up the files and run the game on an offline (or connected) computer that's never had Steam installed (or has, or has had). Point is, playing the game requires neither Steam nor an internet connection. GETTING the game requires a Steam account and the Steam client.

Steam only is not DRM free for me even if you can copy stuff manually.

I wouldn't want to install Steam either but how do you justify that definition of DRM?

If you can zip up a game downloaded through Steam and run it on a machine with neither the Steam client nor Internet access, then, for that game, Steam's only technical role is as a competitor to the GOG Downloader.

@ssokolow: In the context of regional pricing, Steam as as a service has tons of restrictions on where you can buy or play and etc. That's already DRM on the whole thing for me. Even if you can fish out exceptions, they aren't advertised and you need to guess. Plus there is no guarantee that manual copying is equivalent to complete installation which can involve scripts and etc. Since Steam doesn't officially provide standalone packages / installers / tarballs I consider them to always have DRM.

+ they push currently the usage of the steamworks API which leads to games which are platform locked (to the Steam platform which is NOT a open platform despite what GabeN is telling about windows 8)