I love the cool DIY vibes on itch, but it’s troubling how much commercial closed-source tech you see on there. Also itch itself is not a free-software platform. They encourage gamedevs to share their games, but themselves don’t share their software… just as hypocrit as evil Github!

My questions are:

  • is there a free-software itch-like platform? maybe even a federated one where you don’t need a centralized server?
  • is there an itch-like platform dedicated to free-software games?

I remember there were a few projects like that YEARS AGO in the early days of Steam but i don’t remember the names and i don’t know how successful they were.

Anyway, are folks from this community interested in this?

  • @testman
    5•3 years ago

    O wait, so you are looking that hosts exclusively FOSS games, not something that is a FOSS platform?

    Good question. However I believe that it would be very very small niche if you were to exclusively target the FOSS gamedev community.

    Good first step towards what you want to see would probably be to develop an aggregator that shows FOSS games that are already available on existing platforms (Steam, Humble, GOG, Itch.io, GitHub, GitLab, etc)

    • @southerntofuOP
      5•3 years ago

      O wait, so you are looking that hosts exclusively FOSS games, not something that is a FOSS platform?

      Ideally, both :)

      it would be very very small niche

      Indeed. But it could grow. I mean i’m asking on /c/itch_io because there’s a lot of non-profit development taking place on itch. In my view all these developments should be free-software and should encourage cooperation between artists/projects. Like a tiny ecosystem growing horizontally :)