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?
For federated app stores… On Android, there’s F-Droid. On free desktop systems (GNU/Linux, BSD) there’s Flatpak. I don’t know of a cross-platform solution, though. An emerging alternative to Flatpak is GNU guix which is way more reliable/secure/consistent, but it doesn’t have a graphical user interface yet.
For non-federated, but multi-provider software “stores”, there’s gamehub, pegasus, athenaeum, lutris and a bunch of others. I don’t think any of those has a free-software, selfhostable server code (to distribute your own games) yet. But one or two have a Windows/Mac version i believe.
An open standard protocol could help improve the ecosystem, but i don’t know anyone working on that.