I'm worried that Gaben isn't immortal and he'll eventually die/retire/sell etc, and the people in his footsteps won't share his vision. Throughout history this has been an often repeated story.
Valve are a private company, so Microsoft can't just barge in and buy it up.
Considering the investment Valve has poured into Linux because Gabe doesn't trust Microsoft enough to have his business rely on Windows, I'd be pretty shocked if he decided to sell up to Microsoft.
Valve is my favorite company. Not just because I like video games, but I love the way Gabe runs it. Valve is so customer focused and deserves the "don't be evil" slogan. I am very scared of the day we lose Gabe because it's his vision that drives them. Selling to Microsoft would destroy everything that makes them good.
Would that mean that EXT4 is now compatible with Windows?
I know the goal is specifically for better Wine support but wouldn't this extend to Windows itself?
Obviously it wouldn't be supported by Windows directly but hypothetically?
I don't know the technical details of the EXT4 case-insensitive support so maybe someone can shed some light on this.
Not really. Windows only supports FAT and NTFS filesystems natively. There was an old ext-fs driver back in the day, but I have not looked for one in a decade or more. There might be one out there already.
The deal with case-insensative support is likely from Windows users who are annoyed that Readme.md, readme.md, and README.MD are separate files on ext4 but the same file in FAT or NTFS. UNIX and Linux come from a school of thought that allowed you to do things like use different case in filenames.
They were heavily involved into establishing DRM in the video gaming world.
They were among the first to establish "FreeToPlay", Lootboxes and whaling, a predatory business tactic.
They accepted right wing extremist games in the past.
They have a kind of monopolist web store for PC games.
They are known to use the embrace and suffocate tactic against community projects in the past (DotA, once a community driven project is now a trademark of Valve).
The linux gaming scene is flourishing, but this comes at the price of dependency. And not all this dependencies can be resolved at the will of the community; many of the users that came over in the last time are probably unable to start a binary without help.
And they were nice enough to leave the unit they gifted to us locked inside, safely and visibly trapped in the bars of a cage where they can't stab us with the pointy fork they invented!