Linux fans get annoyed when I compare Valve to Apple, but the comparison is more accurate than they want to believe.

Apple’s OS core really is open source. That’s Darwin: XNU, large portions of BSD userland, networking subsystems, and low-level components released under Apple’s open-source license. And when Apple rolled it out in 1999, Eric S. Raymond stood on stage endorsing it because Apple wasn’t phoning it in—they were pouring real engineering into BSD.

And those contributions weren’t theoretical. Apple pushed hardware drivers BSD never had the resources to build: networking, storage, USB, FireWire. They drove kernel modernization: Mach scheduling upgrades, serious VM improvements, better SMP support. They introduced security models that rippled outward—MAC frameworks, sandboxing ideas, privilege separation strategies. They improved networking with IPv6 work, RFC compliance, Wi-Fi robustness, and mDNS/Bonjour. And Apple’s early, heavy funding of LLVM/Clang didn’t just benefit Darwin—it became the modern BSD toolchain because Apple paid for the hard parts.

Those contributions were real, substantial, and transformative—even though macOS itself stayed proprietary at the UI/framework layer.

And that’s the point.

Valve is doing the exact same thing. Their Linux work is real—Proton, Mesa pressure, kernel scheduling, shader pipelines—just like Apple’s BSD work was real. But the thing Valve protects is the thing that gives them leverage: Steam. Closed. Central. Non-negotiable.

Apple open-sourced the scaffolding and protected the part that mattered.

Valve open-sources the scaffolding and protects the part that matters.

Same strategy. Different era.

https://atomicpoet.org/notice/B0FbIBlMXv9kTiW27c