I thought I did this yesterday but - it's nowhere to be found.

1. I tried to search this to see if it has already been answered but the search function did nothing.

2. When I log into the current game I'm playing, I get an error message of sorts stating that there is a disagreement between files on my PC and the cloud and asking which is the most current so they can be synced. One can also choose, "ignore". I really have no idea which would be most current so have either chosen "ignore" or my PC as the most current. How does one even know? Am I doing something wrong that causes this? So far, I haven't notoced any impact but it is making me nervous.

I'm a massive open source advocate and long time developer and user, and if GOG were to open source just about anything, I'd support the notion. Having said that, it is very clear that GOG does not have the manpower right now to do everything they'd like to do with Galaxy in the timeframe they'd optimally prefer - even ignoring Linux exists at all and that they even sell games on the platform for the time being. Reading through the linked Galaxy thread at Venom's comments and the rest of the posts since then seems to confirm this, that they have limited finite resources and they are trying to allocate their limited resources to the projects they think will bring them and us users the biggest bang for the buck. From a business perspective that makes total sense even though I dislike the fact that this is the case.

Unfortunately none of us have the luxury of peering into GOG's internal developer calendars, task lists, project planning Gantt charts and other private company internal data on how they are managing their projects and resources, what their goals are and how they can best use the resources they have to drive their business forward as rapidly as possible (regardless of how it might appear externally).

With very small open source projects, one can decide to open source them over a weekend, toss them up on Github or wherever, spend a day or two throwing together a Wordpress site, fire up a few GNU mailman mailing lists, some web forums etc. It can be done in days to a week or so for really small projects.

With larger projects however this isn't the case. It involves a lot of planning, reviewing source code carefully line by line looking for things that are private and never intended for public eyes, having a legal scan to ensure nothing would cause lawyers to go apeshit and many other factors. It involves having employees who are tasked with planning it all out, building out all of the public resources, developing in house tools, documentation, and many other things. They might use proprietary tools internally to build some parts of it which cost money and have no free version. That would have to be replaced or some other path to a solution found. Every one of these type of roadblocks takes up time to figure out how to find solutions to all the issues on a pathway towards opening up the source code. Existing manpower would have to be assigned to doing all of this, or new hires would have to be made. Realistically it would have to be someone already at the company highly familiar with the Galaxy project and also skilled with building successful non-trivial open source projects.

They would have to have a go-to person for community communications, document all of the processes that they use, code styling, code review and various other things. Again, all of which consume resources. While all of that is going on, those people are not working on Galaxy doing what they're doing right now and their current contributions to Galaxy grind to a halt more or less. For anyone who hasn't heard of Brook's Law, it is essentially a form of Brook's Law which roughly states that adding more people to a project does not always make the project get done faster as it generates a lot of new work getting all of the new people up to scratch on how things work, and in a case of open sourcing - it creates various new work that didn't exist before and manpower to do all of that.

Another factor that would be a problem is that Galaxy isn't just proprietary non-public source code, but it's internal future design specifications and roadmaps, the direction the company wants to take the software, the lists of features and functionality they plan to add in the future is also all private company trade secrets. There are likely tonnes of breadcrumbs of their internal secret plans etc. spread throughout the source code. They would have to either completely give up on the entire Galaxy project being a closed project also and completely publicize all of their plans so external open source developers knew where things are going in the future. Their competitors would then also know what they plan to do, and that's probably not something they are comfortable in announcing to the world I'm sure.

Ultimately, they would end up having to maintain two forks of Galaxy, a public branch which is an open source core not unlike Google's Chromium browser and the Chromium Embedded Framework that they use within Galaxy, and a private internal GOG build that contains extra features and functionality and all of the "secret sauce" that they don't want to make public all along. They'd have to merge changes back and forth between the two trees very carefully to ensure their secret sauce isn't inadvertently leaked publicly. All of this IMHO would greatly complicate whatever internal build processes, QA processes and other processes that they already have in place, so they'd have to add new infrastructure and reallocate additional resources to all of these new things too.

If I sound like I've done this before... it's because I've done this before. :) Based on my own personal experience and the little that we do know about Galaxy and about GOG, I would speculate that if this is the path they wanted to take, it would take them 6-12 months or more to put it all together and make it happen, and during that time they would get a lot less done actually coding on Galaxy in the process.

They'd be doing all of that based on a small number of open source enthusiasts opinions that open sourcing it would solve all of their problems and be great for them - even though none of us actually know what GOG's own prerogatives are internally. If there's one thing I've learned over time when trying to convince anyone anywhere to release anything as open source - first thing one has to know is what the other party's (GOG) wants and needs are, what their plans are and what is important to them and their business. To win the other party over to open sourcing their product, the negotiators have to know what they (GOG) want, and demonstrate to them in terms that matter to _THEM_ how open sourcing it will give them what they want and provide benefits to them that _THEY_ want.

That's not what normally happens when enthusiasts are upset about some software not doing what they want and wave the "open source it and all of your problems will magically be solved" flag though. Instead, the open source enthusiasts tend to describe all of the benefits that they themselves will receive, and tell of benefits the other party will receive that may or may not be aligned with the actual interests and prerogatives of the other party who owns the project.

Another factor in all of this is that they are also a publicly traded company in Poland. I do not know much at all about the securities regulations in Poland, but I know that companies operating in North America have to meet certain requirements with the SEC et al, and there is a whole slew of regulatory stuff concerning not releasing "non public material information" publicly. It's doable, but it is a lot of extra legal red tape that has to be dealt with, and generally filtered through lawyers.

So as much as I'd love to some day see Galaxy be open sourced, and as much as I'd love to even try to convince GOG to do it myself, putting myself into a neutral position where I have to explain why it would be a good thing for them to do in terms that benefit GOG for all the associated costs, I'd be hard pressed to find language to describe to them how they would get a major win-win situation from doing it as soon as possible.

I think if they wanted to toy with open source seriously they would be best off open sourcing some much smaller project they might have and managing that and learning how to deal with it all and building up some experience with maintaining public open source projects and communication etc. first, then building upon that over time.

Another thing to consider is that if there are people in the open source community who seriously would and could contribute to Galaxy in a manner that is genuinely valuable to GOG - they have continuous job postings on their website to hire people who want to do just that. Why do it as a volunteer if one can actually get paid to do it?

Throwing big projects over the fence without all of the proper thought put into it and all the stuff I talked about above tends to be a recipe for disaster IMHO.

I think I would happily participate in some kind of "crowdfunding" or "pre-order" of galaxy for linux, just to shift priorities at least at and get things going.

Not if they manage it properly. Several big projects were opened successfully in the past, so it is doable. For instance, AMD are now going through the exact process you described above for their Vulkan driver which they plan to open, while at the same time developing it further.

I suppose Lisa Su just made a firm decision, that AMD should support open source, and needed resources were allocated.
Because that won't be open source anymore.

AMD is a huge company with a couple of decades of experience working directly with the open source community, both contributing patches and their own projects. They also have a tonne of developers and are not under extremely limited finite resources. It's not far from saying something like "Even Microsoft has some open source projects on the web, so there is no excuse." It's an apples to oranges comparison.

GOG does not have the financial nor the manpower resources that AMD has.

The easy way to do that is to start an organized project either here in the forums or on a website to advocate people purchase games on GOG that do support Linux already, and to actually run them in Linux. It would have to not only be people already using Linux to do this, but a lot more people who are not currently playing their games in Linux who may or may not have ever even used Linux.

The problem is not that GOG needs people to donate $10000 on Kickstarter to make this happen, it is that the market share for Linux that they currently support is sufficiently small enough that allocating developer and other resources to solving this problem takes away resources from developing features and functionality that affect the majority of users and reallocating those resources to functionality that affects less than 1% of users. Before someone suggests there are more than 1% of Linux users on GOG - we do not have any statistics about OS usage on GOG at all, and even if GOG had 1% of users using Linux right now - not everyone is a pro-Galaxy fan itching to use Galaxy, so some fraction less than 100% of the actual existing Linux users would potentially be interested anyway.

GOG wont likely tell us what percentage of users use Linux, but they have said before somewhere in the forums that it is very small, and smaller than what some people have suggested it might be or words to that effect.

Truth be told, I think it is extremely unlikely that the rationale they have right now for not working on Galaxy for Linux is not going to change in any material way in 2017, 2018, 2019 or perhaps even beyond that The best we can hope for is that they continue to grow as a company as a whole even bigger and get enough of a surge of revenue in the coming months and years from what they are doing well, and perhaps from Cyberpunk 2077 when it comes out - that they can afford to hire a much larger development team for Galaxy development than they have now. We don't know the exact head count of people working on Galaxy at the moment, but their names are scattered in the credits for Witcher 3, in the forums to the observant eye, and littered across LinkedIn, Facebook, and a dozen or so other websites out there as well as a few other places. Gathering this data together I discovered many months ago that the entire team of people who have worked on Galaxy seemed to only be about 30-40 people total who had any public presence to verify they were involved with it, and it appeared that perhaps only about 20 currently active at that time.

Even if they had 40 people total, they wouldn't all be developers. There would be people working on graphics, managing, testing and other capacities. The number of actual developers is very small and I would estimate it is less than 10 who contribute directly to the code regularly. Allocating even one person full time to work on Linux exclusively would probably be devoting anywhere from 10-30% or more of their entire development manpower to working on something for a small fraction of 1% of their customers.

How do we get them to be able to rationalize doing it? By increasing the number of people using Linux and increasing the number of people playing GOG games on Linux _without_ Galaxy in a manner that GOG can see the statistics themselves. I'm not sure how best to do that other than actually doing it, although it wouldn't hurt if everyone and their brother started downloading the standalone installers for all games for Linux regularly even if they have no idea what Linux actually is. :)

I think this is something that we're just not going to convince them to change their minds on via Internet lynch mob. Nor by some kind of ineffective begging/crowdfunding/petition/boycott or the usual nonsense people do when they don't get their way. The only way to really change their minds is to make GOG see measurable revenue hit their bank account by actual Linux gamers buying and playing games in Linux and that number increasing over time. Alternatively waiting 2/3/5/whatever years until they have shit tonnes more resources that they actually can allocate a few devs dedicated to Linux and it wont affect their overall team because it is a much larger team at that point.

Until then, we're just being frustrated about this and bikeshedding solutions to the problem that is great for us but not necessarily so good for GOG nor their business bottom line. I really hate saying that, but I believe it is true and our grumbling to them and begging wont likely make any ground.

But the best way to "crowd fund" this, is to buy and play GOG games on LInux, right here, right now. That is 100% direct crowd funding, with 100% of the funds going right into the right spot to make things happen.

Furthermore I'd encourage gamers who stream, to stream from Linux and advocate GOG games running on Linux on Twitch etc. Get the word out there and convince people by leading by example. If I were into streaming and had the time to do that sort of thing, that's how I'd contribute to it - via direct positive oriented advocacy of what I want to see happen.

But let's be real, nothing outside of a miracle is going to drastically increase sales enough the make a difference, and a companies bottom line should never be a customers worry. GOG promoted and offers Linux support and now they are clearly not providing the same level of support to Linux users find on other platforms. So why provide support at all if you are only going to half ass it?

This is the chicken and the egg problem all over again. GOG basically says there is not enough Linux users to justify resources being allocated to providing Galaxy on Linux. But how can GOG expect Linux users to buy on GOG to create that demand if they are getting a worse experience than other storefronts? I'm of the... if you build it they will come mind set. Many Linux users who would buy on GOG aren't doing so because they can get a better experience with Steam, no amount of DRM Free is going to change that.

Did Valve half ass Linux support? No the jumped in head first and pushed Linux gaming to new heights. Now I'm not expecting GOG to be Valve, we all know Valve has the resources for that sort of thing. But CD Projekt is no small company and if they wanted to GOG could have the resources it needs to offer Galaxy on Linux. Venom, who I assume is project lead on Galaxy, of course would not be responsible for this... but that doesn't mean he can't take it up the food chain to higher management that are making these decisions. Working as a lonely developer myself I know you can't just do what you would like to do.

Linux could also very well be the salvation of GOG in the future. With what Microsoft is doing in the Windows Store and with Windows 10 S (locking out non store apps)... GOG had better be worried about what Microsoft could do in the future.

That was enough with Windows 8 for Gabe Newell to call it "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space", and it scarred him enough to spend millions to push Linux to the same level as Windows for gaming. Now we are starting to see that fear turn into something that could actually cause problems for everyone but Microsoft. And when somebody like Gabe Newell calls out something as a catastrophe the industry takes notice.

So GOG not investing in Linux now, regardless of the demand for it now, could very well bite them in the ass down the road. This is something Valve believes and if Valve believes it GOG should take care to heed that warning.

Linux was added well before galaxy was introduced. Are you saying they should just remove all Linux games from gog? All games on gog are c;early labeled if they support Linux, so it's not like they are try to cheat anyone.

Yes, they did a full-on job and definitely invested serious coin into this project. Now go and check how many Linux players they have. 3-5%? Now assume it's half of it on gog, and you're investing in a feature for 2% of your users, instead of doing a feature for Windows, that will affect 90% users.

EDIT: Plus, how many years it took Valve to add Linux after launching Steamworks?

Yeah, let's be honest here. Steam didn't introduce Linux and SteamOS support out of goodness of their heart. They are big enough to fear MS and wanted to become independent. It's also important to say, that most developers don't care about the SteamOS.

Well, yeah maybe in 5-10 years it will become an issue. But they are not saying they are not interested in Linux at all. Just not right now. And if they are stupid, and it will bite them in the ass in the end, they will deserve it.

Thanks for very detailed response! I should have given some more detailed reasoning behind original idea as well :)

I totally agree about "croudfunding" by buying and playing linux versions of games. Actually that's what brought me to gog at time, I just wanted to support both DRM-free and linux support and play some nice games.

However the issue is that I (and probably lots of people as well) prefer to use dual boot with Galaxy because it's just much more convenient. No need to download manually (I'm aware of lgogdownloader and such but it's not that user friendly), then run those silly installers by hand. There are no cloud saves, no achievements, no time tracking - and those are reason I dual boot to use galaxy and not download and use linux versions, even being gentoo user for 14 years.

And this totally screws statistics! Catch 22: people don't run games on linux because of galaxy, gog doesn't develop galaxy for linux because people don't download linux versions.

The proposal with "croudfunding" was not to actually crowdfund in order to hire/dedicate developers but just to show that people really need GOG Galaxy on linux. I'm aware of wishlist entry with 10k+ votes but it's easy to just click on "vote" button. I was just thinking of putting my money where my mouth is and kind of try to break that catch 22 situation described above.

Anyway it was not really a serious proposal, just some thinking aloud I guess. I don't have pink glasses and not pushing for open sourcing galaxy or trying to lynch mob GOG for lack of Galaxy linux client, I understand it's just business. Just a bit frustrated after several years of waiting.

And if we wouldn't bikeshed at all then what's the use of forums. As part of community I feel responsible for keeping the issue visible! :)

Of course not, but there is big difference between throwing up a Linux build on the site and calling it a day vs actually spending the resources to give Linux the proper support as any other platform. And they are cheating consumers and developers in the sense that they say "yea we provide Linux support" but then developers can't release games on GOG for Linux due to lack of Galaxy and Linux consumers can't purchase games they would have here if proper support was offered. So it's more like "yea we provide Linux support, but only if we deem it viable to us". That's another way of saying we support it but we don't really want to support it.

This is why you develop with cross-platform support in mind so that you are duplicating as little as possible. Of course there is no getting around platform specific code and work, but GOG can minimize it quite a bit. I've also never really found Steam's Hardware Survey to be particularly reliable as far as the amount of Linux users. Many Linux users still dual boot. We also don't know how many GOG users there are.. .2 - 3 % could be very little or quite a bit depending on the answer. Same with Steam if you look a the overall user base.

As of Feb, 2017 there were 3000 Linux games on Steam. That is more than GOG's entire catalog. And over 1000 were added in the last 5 months. It also increasing a lot.

So developers don't care about Steam OS?

The problem with saying you are not interested right now is... you lose access to games that would be here right now on Linux but won't be because of lacking Galaxy. So this means that when they do decide to support it they will be in a far less valuable position then they would have been.

And 5 - 10 years? Maybe... but it might be sooner than you think. I personally believe Microsoft is going to test the waters with Windows 10 S in the school sector then roll out it for free for the home sector. They will likely replace Windows 10 Home and retire it, making Windows 10 S the default option with the ability to upgrade to PRO (with a small fee) for non-store apps.

Sure hardcore gamers will be more inclined to upgrade, but casual gamers are way less likely. And believe it or not but most gamers are casual, the hardcore base is rather small. Take for instance Steam there are a handful of games that have a crap load of players and these people play the same game all the time... Dota 2 and CSGO for instance.

Losing the casual base, even for GOG could hurt them...

Well, I guess we can agree to disagree.

You are missing the point. Pro or not pro Galaxy, Linux now is simply missing releases on GOG because of lack of Galaxy. The trend which will only potentially worsen as time goes on.

And let's stop this "you should buy more Linux games here, and then GOG might start supporting Galaxy for Linux". GOG decided to support Linux, and if they are reconsidering now, it's not something we can influence. It's a problem with their management, not with GOG users. Other companies invest in Linux gaming market to help it grow.