Though some will protest that its DRM system is detestable, Valve's Steam platform is by far one of the best compromises between publishers and gamers, and it's a key contributor to the overall health of PC gaming. Valve has gradually developed the once-despised platform into something worth supporting, but if there is any one remaining flaw of the system, it's that the service is not cross-platform compatible. However, if some snoopers who have found Linux binaries in Valve code are correct, that may need a qualifying "yet."

Some crafty penguin-heads have come across a bit of interesting code buried deep within the Windows client for the Left 4 Dead demo. According to phoronix, the Windows demo contains a number of shared libraries for Linux, including a number of APIs that are at least named to suggest they could play a key role in a Linux-capable version of the game and Steam itself: files like steamclient_linux.so, studiorender_i486.so, vstdlib_i486.so, libsteam_api_linux.so, and engine_i486.so. Within them, a number of strings pertaining to data unrelated to the game or a Linux-based server (or its subsequent command-line client) for it, including some global Steam calls, were found.

While this is hardly definitive proof of anything, the gents over at phoronix note that this follows the company's recent call out for a senior software engineer to port games to Linux. With the recent improvements to the platform—most notably Steam Cloud, which unties a specific PC from the platform equation—it doesn't seem entirely out of the question that Valve would be striving to build a gaming service that is completely platform-agnostic.