Rich Geldreich A few weeks after this post went out, some very senior developers from Microsoft came by for a discrete visit. They loved our post, because it lit a fire underneath Microsoft's executives to get their act together and keep supporting Direct3D development. (Remember, at this point it was years since the last DirectX SDK release. The DirectX team was on life support.) Linux is obviously extremely influential.



Rich Geldreich It's perhaps hard to believe, but the Steam Linux effort made a significant impact inside of multiple corporations. It was a surprisingly influential project. Valve being deeply involved with Linux also gives the company a "worse case scenario" hedge vs. Microsoft. It's like a club held over MS's heads. They just need to keep spending the resources to keep their in-house Linux expertise in a healthy state.



Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

It's always interesting to read about what happens inside of Valve. Rich Geldreich, who previously worked at Valve has blogged about his experience inside Valve during Valve's push towards Linux.It seems Rich was a rather important member of the team and one of the influential people in getting OpenGL + Linux support up to scratch.He was responsible for speaking to external driver teams and their managers/execs, and he helped present to external game developers about how to get good performance out of OpenGL.I fondly remember reading the Valve blog post about getting Left 4 Dead 2 running faster on Linux than it did on Windows. I remember feeling so happy about everything that was happening. Rich Geldreich was the one feeding the information to Gabe Newell himself (the owner of Valve) who wrote the blog post.It seems Valve's plans well and truly scared Microsoft too:That'sinteresting to read about. I had no idea Valve pushing OpenGL and Linux was this serious a threat that Microsoft visited Valve directly.It sounds like we have a lot to thank Rich for. He even shares what a lot of other people believe, that Linux was/is a safeguard for Valve against Microsoft:Sadly, it seems when Valve let a bunch of people go back in 2013, the Linux team suffered due to this.Check out the blog post here