Linux Blimp

Bitmain announced a “Sophon BM1880 EDB” 96Boards CE SBC featuring its new Sophon BM1880 AI chip plus dual Cortex-A53 cores that run Linux. There’s also a RISC-V chip and optional Raspberry Pi and Arduino modules.

Beijing-based Bitmain, which is known primarily as a leading vendor of bitcoin mining chips and computers, also has a “Sophon” AI chip business built around its BM1680 and more recent BM1682 Tensor Computing Processor (TPU) AI chips. Bitmain recently announced a third-gen BM1880 TPU along with a Sophon BM1880 Edge Development Board (EDB) 96Boards CE SBC, referred to by 96Boards.org as the “Sophon Edge.”

Sophon BM1880 EDB

The open spec, Linux-driven Sophon BM1880 Edge SBC will be available at the end of the month for $129, but you can reserve an order now. The company also announced a BM1880-based USB stick and compute module, among other products (see farther below).

In conjunction with the Sophon BM1880 Edge announcement, Bitmain joined the steering committee of Linaro’s 96Boards community. The SBC is the latest of Linaro’s rather loosely defined 96Boards.ai family of AI-enabled 96Boards products. These include boards like the Sophon BM1880 EDB and HiSilicon Hikey970 that are equipped with neural network acceleration chips, as well as other boards without such accelerators such as the DragonBoard 920C and Rockchip Rock960, but which can also be used for edge AI applications.

The Sophon BM1880 EDB is called the first ASIC-based 96Boards.ai product, even though only the BM1880 TPU is an ASIC, not the dual 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 cores that accompany it. The BM1880 TPU and the EDB board are designed for deep learning techniques, like facial recognition, object detection and recognition, license plate recognition, and voiceprint recognition “in real-time on small devices without needing an Internet connection,” says Bitmain.

Sophon BM1880

Sophon BM1880 TPU

The BM1880 is available both in the dual -A53 version, which enables it to be used as the main processor, or as a deep learning co-processor without the -A53 cores. The BM1880 “can also receive video streams and image data from other hosts and then carry out inference and return the results back to the hosts,” says Bitmain.

The BM1880 TPU offers 1 TOP performance on 8-bit integer operations and up to 2 TOPS with Winograd convolution acceleration, claims Bitmain. The company touts the TPU for its scheduling engine, “which supplies extremely high bandwidth data flow effectively to all the tensor processor cores.” The chip integrates 2MB of memory.

The BM1880 TPU is accompanied by deep learning model compilers and an SDK. Deep learning frameworks like Caffe, ONNX, Pytorch, and Tensorflow “can be easily ported to the BM1880 platform,” says Bitmain. It also supports neural network models including CNN, RNN and DNN. The EDB board is said to offer further support for ResNet50, Yolo V2, GoogleNet V1, MobileNet v1/v2, SSD300, Alexnet, and VGG16.

Sophon BM1880 EDB

Aside from its processors, the Sophon BM1880 EDB (Sophon Edge) board is a pretty standard 96Boards CE SBC except that it’s a headless board without video ports and lacks the usual 60-pin high speed connector. The 96Boards compatible 40-pin connector is presumably where you’d add mezzanine boards for the announced Raspberry Pi and Arduino development modules. However, there were no details on the add-ons.

Sophon BM1880 EDB block diagram

This the first board we’ve seen with a RISC-V companion processor, which is unexplained except to say it’s a 750MHz chip. Presumably, this is an MCU-like RISC-V part for real-time processing, possibly designed by Bitmain. That’s a high clock rate for an MCU, so it might be an alternative Linux chip in addition to the dual -A53 block.

A 750MHz clock rate is too low for any of SiFive’s Linux-ready RISC-V chips like the Freedom U540 and upcoming, second-gen U74 and U74-MC. Since Bitmain is a Chinese company, however, it might be one of the new, Linux-ready RISC-V derived C-SKY chips from Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems.

The Sophon BM1880 EDB is equipped with 1GB LPDDR4, 8GB eMMC, and a microSD slot. The board provides GbE, WiFi, and Bluetooth for networking, as well as 3x USB 3.0 host ports and micro-USB and JTAG debug interfaces. Specific Linux images are said to be coming soon.

Specifications listed for the Sophon BM1880 EDB (Sophon Edge) include:

• Processor — Bitmain BM1880 TPU combined with 2x -Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.5GHz and 750MHz RISC-V chip
• Memory/storage:
  • 1GB LPDDR4 (3200MHz)
  • 8GB eMMC
  • MicroSD slot
• Wireless — USB-based WiFi and Bluetooth with antenna
• Networking — Gigabit Ethernet port
• Other I/O:
  • 3x USB 3.0 host/OTG ports (not counting 1x reserved for wireless module)
  • Micro-USB UART debug port
  • JTAG for CPU; optional JTAG for RISC-V
• Expansion:
  • 40-pin 96Boards low-speed expansion connector
  • Optional Raspberry Pi and Arduino add-on modules
• Other features — boot switch; LEDs
• Power — 4-16V ([email protected] or [email protected]) DC jack
• Operating temperature — 0 to 40℃
• Weight — 36 g
• Dimensions — 85 x 54mm (96Boards CE)
• Operating system — Linux

Bitmain’s BM1880 based USB stick and module

Bitmain also announced a USB-connected Neural Network Stick (NNS) implementation of the BM1880, much like Intel’s Neural Compute Stick and Google’s Edge TPU Accelerator. There’s also a 38 x 38mm Neural Network Module (NNM) based on the BM1880. Neither appear to offer the dual -A53 cores for autonomous Linux operation. Both require connected X86_64 computers running Ubuntu (NNS) or Ubuntu or Windows (NNM).

Bitmain Neural Network Stick (left) and Neural Network Module

Bitmain also announced a 19-inch 2U

Sophon AI Server SA3

rackmount computer that incorporates three processing units, each with 6x of the earlier BM1682 processors, for 18 processors overall. The system includes an unnamed quad-core processor (probably an Intel Core) that supports Red Hat, CentOS, or Ubuntu distributions.

Bitmain Sophon AI Server SA3 (left)and Embedded Mini AI Machine SE3

A separate Embedded Mini AI Machine SE3 system equipped with the BM1682 targets the smart park market. The 210 x 115 x 45mm device supports 4x dynamic or 10x static facial recognition streams and offers single-precision peak performance of 3 TFLOPS with 60W consumption. Bitmain previously used the BM1682 for an SC3 deep learning accelerator card. No OS or additional processor was listed.

Finally, Bitmain said it would launch a next-generation Cloud chip BM1684 TPU chip by the end of the year, featuring “significantly increased performance.” The chip will drive a new SA5 server.

Further information

The Sophon BM1880 Edge Development Board (EDB) (Sophon Edge) is not yet available, but you can reserve a pre-order for $129 here for shipment due Nov. 30.

More information may be found on the 96Boards Sophon Edge page and Bitmain’s Sophon BM1880 EDB product page. The announcement of the Sophon BM1880 EDB, NNS stick, NNM module, and Bitmain’s other new products may be found here.

Source

News briefs for November 7, 2018.

Radxa is launching a Raspberry Pi clone called the Rock Pi that runs Linux or
Android on a hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC. LinuxGizmos writes that the Rock Pi will closely match the RPi 3 layout and “may be the most affordable RK3399 based SBC yet, starting at $39 with 1GB RAM”.

Mender.io, the open-source update manager for IoT,
announces its collaboration with Google Cloud IoT Core “to create a reference integration enabling rapid detection and updates of issues in IoT devices”. Thomas Ryd, CEO of Northern.tech, the company behind the Mender.io project says, “Almost daily news stories circulate about bricked devices due to poor home-built update tools. We are inspired to address this common problem with an open-source project.” The collaboration has “resulted in a tutorial and reference integration to easily detect issues with Cloud IoT Core and the ability to correct those issues via updates to IoT devices with Mender. Users of Cloud IoT Core now have a secure and robust way to keep their Linux devices securely updated.” See the Google blog post for more details.

Parasoft announces a new initiative to support open-source projects and
communities. The company plans to offer free access to its tool suite “enabling developers to leverage test automation software, deep code analysis, and security capabilities for their open-source projects”. To be eligible, developers must “prove they are an active contributor and vital to an open-source project that is recognized within the global open-source community. The free user licenses will be valid for one year.” Send email to opensource@parasoft.com for more information.

The Linux Foundation is forming a new foundation to support the open-source
GraphQL specification. eWeek reports that “the move to create a new vendor-neutral independent
foundation under the Linux Foundation will help further advance the development of GraphQL”. The GraphQL started out as an internal project at Facebook for its newsfeed API and was open-sourced in 2015. Currently, the specification is used “beyond Facebook by web properties including GitHub, Shopify, Twitter and Airbnb, among others”.

Keeper Security announces its new BreachWatch dark web monitoring product.
BreachWatch searches the dark web for user accounts from compromised websites and notifies users when it finds their account information, alerting them to update their credentials. BreachWatch is available for iOS, Android and Linux. See the press release for more information.

Source

For those of you after some more casual and relaxing games, Equilinox will have you nurture your own ecosystem.

From developer ThinMatrix, Equilinox is a sandbox experience giving you control over what happens. You will nurture each plant and animal, all with their own life cycle. Make sure everything is happy and healthy, as it will give you more points as everything evolves and moves on.

To help with this, you will be given the ability to genetically modify species, which sounds rather interesting.

For those interested in more background details, the developer has been releasing regular videos on YouTube showing off how far it has come. Much like us, they’re also funded thanks to a Patreon campaign.

I think it looks really sweet! It’s releasing on November 23rd on Steam, hopefully one I will take a look at as it could be quite nice for kids too.

Source

Share with friends and colleagues on social media

When a new version of a product comes out — especially when that product is something I use every day — there are two things that go through my mind.

1) Yay! New toy!

2) What’s new?!?

Now, I’ll admit that the first one is a bit childish, but despite 20+ years working in IT, I still find myself a bit giddy at the thought of new software, new tools or a new operating system version. I want to know what it does that the previous version didn’t, or what has been made better that wasn’t my favorite feature last time I purchased it.

If it’s a new OS — something that I’ll be using every day in a variety of ways — I want to know what I’m doing. I need to know how it installs, what it’s primary functions are, and how to use it in the many diverse roles that an operating system plays in enterprise IT.

So, let me give you an example: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (SLE 15), our latest release. If you’re reading this blog post, you probably have some experience with SUSE Linux Enterprise, or SLE. Perhaps you’ve been using SUSE products since the ’90s and are just looking for the list of changes. Maybe you are new to SUSE Linux and want to learn the basics. But maybe it goes a bit deeper than that. Perhaps you want to talk with someone that has explored the product, read the documentation and is ready to lead a discussion into what makes the operating system different and useful.

Available Training for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15

That’s where SUSE Training comes in. We’ve been working alongside the development of SLE 15 to ensure you know what you’re doing with our latest release. If you want to discuss what’s new and how to move to SLE 15, you might be interested in our Transitioning to SLE 15 course. In this course, we walk through the new installer, the change in vision for SLE 15, and what makes multimodal IT something everyone in IT should understand. We also highlight the differences to the developer tools, the core OS changes, and how your infrastructure may change as a result of SLE 15. There are hands-on labs to ensure you understand those core changes, as well as how to install or upgrade to SLE 15.

But what if Linux is a foreign language to you? We have something to help with that, too. Our SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Administration course will get you going the right direction. We introduce Linux, it’s various SUSE flavors, and give you labs to practice what you learn. The command line (shell) is explained, making it less intimidating than it may seem.

SUSE Training for Other Products

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is more than just your traditional IT OS, however, and SUSE Training can help you understand why it’s different than it’s monolithic past. You can deploy a software define storage solution, an OpenStack cloud implementation, or your own container platform. We’ve built training for those products, too: SUSE Enterprise Storage Training SUSE OpenStack Cloud Training SUSE Containers as a Service Platform Training

Of course, there are more than those offerings available. We have a catalog of training content to help with most aspects of a SUSE Linux deployment.

We also train on using SLES for SAP, and we have a variety of certification paths to hone and validate your IT skills.

Whatever your interest is in SUSE, we’ve got a way to make you shine in IT. With courses from SUSE, you can get the training you need to make sure you know what you’re doing in SLE 15.

Source

On Tuesday, The Linux Foundation announced that Facebook’s GraphQL project has been moved to a newly-established GraphQL Foundation, which will be hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation. This foundation will be dedicated to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate the development of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem.

GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012 and was later open-sourced in 2015. It has been adopted by many companies in production including Airbnb, Atlassian, Audi, CNBC, GitHub, Major League Soccer, Netflix, Shopify, The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, and Yelp.

Why GraphhQL Foundation has been created?

The foundation will provide a neutral home for the community to collaborate and encourage more participation and contribution. The community will be able to spread responsibilities and costs for infrastructure which will help in increasing the overall investment. This neutral governance will also ensure equal treatment in the community.

The co-creator of GraphQL, Lee Byron said:

“As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support.”

The foundation will also provide more resources for the GraphQL community which will benefit all contributors. It will help in organizing events and working groups, formalizing governance structures, providing marketing support to the project, and handling IP and other legal issues as they arise.

The Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin believes that this new foundation will ensure the long-term support for GraphQL:

“We are thrilled to welcome the GraphQL Foundation into the Linux Foundation. This advancement is important because it allows for long-term support and accelerated growth of this essential and groundbreaking technology that is changing the approach to API design for cloud-connected applications in any language.”

In the next few months, The Linux Foundation with Facebook and the GraphQL community will be finalizing the founding members of the GraphQL Foundation.

Read the full announcement on The Linux Foundation’s website and also check out the GraphQL Foundation’s website.

Source

Fedora KDE Live is an open source and free distribution of Linux, a special Live edition of the well known Fedora operating system, built around the KDE SC desktop environment. It is designed from the ground up to be used for previewing and installing the Fedora OS on high-end machines.

Availability, boot options, supported platforms

The distribution is available for download as two Live DVD ISO images, one for each of the supported hardware platforms (64-bit and 32-bit), which allow users to test the operating system without installing anything on their computers.

There are only two options on the boot prompt. While the first one will start the live environment with default options, the second one give users access to more advanced options, such as the ability to run a memory diagnostic test, boot an operating system that is installed on the first disk, or start the live session in safe graphics mode (only if your graphics card is not recognized by the default entry).

Pure KDE desktop environment with top-notch apps

As mentioned, the graphical session of this Fedora Live CD edition is powered by the well known KDE Plasma Workspace and Applications project, which has been untouched. It’s comprised of a single taskbar located on the bottom edge of the screen, as well as a desktop widget.

The main menu can be accessed from the taskbar, allowing users to open applications. In addition, the taskbar can be used for interacting with running programs or the system tray area. Various widgets can be added with a single mouse click.

Default applications include the Konqueror web browser, Akregator feed reader, KGet download manager, KTorrent torrent downloader, Okular document viewer, Gwenview image viewer, Amarok audio player, K3b CD/DVD/BD burning software, Dragon Player video player, and KMail email client.

Bottom line

In conclusion, no matter if you want to try the KDE SC desktop environment on the Fedora platform or you just want to install the latest Fedora distribution with KDE on your mid-range or high-end computer, you should download the Fedora KDE Live CD.

Source

I’ve been a writer for more than 20 years. I’ve written thousands of articles and how-tos on various technical topics and have penned more than 40 works of fiction. So, the written word is not only important to me, it’s familiar to the point of being second nature. And through those two decades (and counting) I’ve done nearly all my work on the Linux platform. I must confess, during those early years it wasn’t always easy. Formats didn’t always mesh with what an editor required and, in some cases, the open source platform simply didn’t have the necessary tools required to get the job done.

That was then, this is now.

A perfect storm of Linux evolution and web-based tools have made it such that any writer can get the job done (and done well) on Linux. But what tools will you need? You might be surprised to find out that, in some instances, the job cannot be efficiently done with 100% open source tools. Even with that caveat, the job can be done. Let’s take a look at the tools I’ve been using as both a tech writer and author of fiction. I’m going to outline this by way of my writing process for both nonfiction and fiction (as the process is different and requires specific tools).

A word of warning to seriously hard-core Linux users. A long time ago, I gave up on using tools like LaTeX and DocBook for my writing. Why? Because, for me, the focus must be on the content, not the process. When you’re facing deadlines, efficiency must take precedent.

Nonfiction

We’ll start with nonfiction, as that process is the simpler of the two. For writing technical how-tos, I collaborate with different editors and, in some cases, have to copy/paste content into a CMS. But like with my fiction, the process always starts with Google Drive. This is the point at which many open source purists will check out. Fear not, you can always opt to either keep all of your files locally, or use a more open-friendly cloud service (such as Zoho or nextCloud).

Why start on the cloud? Over the years, I’ve found I need to be able to access that content from anywhere at any time. The simplest solution was to migrate the cloud. I’ve also become paranoid about losing work. To that end, I make use of a tool like Insync to keep my Google Drive in sync with my desktop. With that desktop sync in place, I know there’s always a backup of my work, in case something should go awry with Google Drive.

For those clients with whom I must enter content into a Content Management System (CMS), the process ends there. I can copy/paste directly from a Google Doc into the CMS and be done with it. Of course, with technical content, there are always screenshots involved. For that, I use Gimp, which makes taking screenshots simple:

1. Open Gimp.
2. Click File > Create > Screenshot.
3. Select from a single window, the entire screen, or a region to grab.
4. Click Snap.

The majority of my clients tend to prefer I work with Google Docs, because I can share folders so that they have reliable access to the content. There are a few clients I have that do not work with Google Docs, and so I must download the files into a format that can be used. What I do for this is download in .odt format, open the document in LibreOffice , format as needed, save in a format required by the client, and send the document on.

And that, is the end of the line for nonfiction.

Fiction

This is where it gets a bit more complicated. The beginning steps are the same, as I always write every first draft of a novel in Google Docs. Once that is complete, I then download the file to my Linux desktop, open the file in LibreOffice, format as necessary, and then save as a file type supported by my editor (unfortunately, that means .docx).

The next step in the process gets a bit dicey. My editor prefers to use comments over track changes (as it makes it easier for both of us to read the document as we make changes). Because of this, a 60k word doc can include hundreds upon hundreds of comments, which slows LibreOffice to a useless crawl. Once upon a time, you could up the memory used for documents, but as of LibreOffice 6, that is no longer possible. This means any larger, novel-length, document with numerous comments will become unusable. Because of that, I’ve had to take drastic measures and use WPS Office (Figure 3). Although this isn’t an open source solution, WPS Office does a fine job with numerous comments in a document, so there’s no need to deal with the frustration that is LibreOffice (when working with these large files with hundreds of comments).

Once my editor and I finish up the edits for the book (and all comments have been removed), I can then open the file in LibreOffice for final formatting. When the formatting is complete, I save the file in .html format and then open the file in Calibre for exporting the file to .mobi and .epub formats.

Calibre is a must-have for anyone looking to publish on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, or other platforms. One thing Calibre does better than other, similar, solutions is enable you to directly edit the .epub files (Figure 4). For the likes of Smashword, this is an absolute necessity (as the export process will add elements not accepted on the Smashwords conversion tool).

After the writing process is over (or sometimes while waiting for an editor to complete a pass), I’ll start working on the cover for the book. That task is handled completely in Gimp (Figure 5).

And that finishes up the process of creating a work of fiction on the Linux platform. Because of the length of the documents, and how some editors work, it can get a bit more complicated than the process of creating nonfiction, but it’s far from challenging. In fact, creating fiction on Linux is just as simple (and more reliable) than other platforms.

HTH

I hope this helps aspiring writers to have the confidence to write on the Linux platform. There are plenty of other tools available to use, but the ones I have listed here have served me quite well over the years. And although I do make use of a couple of proprietary tools, as long as they keep working well on Linux, I’m okay with that.

Learn more about Linux in the Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux (LFD201) training course from The Linux Foundation, and sign up now to start your open source journey.

Source

Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: New statements from Microsoft’s management (Andersen) serve to show that Microsoft hasn’t really changed; it’s just trying to sell “Azure IP Advantage”, hoping that enough patent trolls with their dubious software patents will blackmail GNU/Linux users into adopting Azure for ‘protection’

THIS morning we wrote four articles about the European Patent Office (EPO), but we haven’t lost sight of American matters, which we typically cover in the weekend due to lack of time. Yesterday we wrote about the aggressive past (arguably patent trolling) of the new Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This past of hers has been mentioned in IPPro Patents coverage that yesterday noted “Peter was also previously vice president and general counsel of Immersion Corporation, where, among other legal roles, she led its IP portfolio.”

Immersion Corporation is a patent aggressor that many out there have also dubbed “patent troll”. Peter’s boss/superior is another person who comes from a questionable background and was likely appointed because of nepotism. So what on Earth is going on? It’s not hard to see who benefits (cui bono).

The Microsoft-friendly and Microsoft-sponsored IAM (it is also sponsored by Microsoft’s patent trolls) has just quoted/paraphrased Microsoft’s patent chief Andersen as saying: “more valuable for us to essentially license our patents through Open Invention And LOT Networks than to try to license them on our own…”

What on Earth does that even mean? Can that be interpreted as Microsoft using OIN to just tax/cross-license with software patents? Remember that Microsoft staff was forbidden from commenting on it. That can only mean that Microsoft is hiding something.

Microsoft, morever, supports the terrible Director who supports patent trolls. Quoting IAM’s tweet: “Andersen on PTO Director Iancu – I’m a fan, he’s doing a super job. One of things we’ve told him is importance of getting certainty back particularly post-Alice. PTO has a role to play in giving us more clarity and I think he’s taken that to heart…”

That doesn’t inspire a positive view of Microsoft’s ‘new’ policy or strategy, which also involves selling ‘protection’ from its patent trolls through Azure Source

Nov 09, 2018, 14:00

Derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, the Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 Update 6 release ships with Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 5 version 4.14.35-1818.3.3 for both 64-bit (x86_64) and ARM architectures, and the Red Hat Compatible Kernel 3.10.0-957, which is only available for 64-bit systems. Besides updated kernels, the Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 Update 6 release comes with numerous new features and improvements, including support for managing path, mount, and timer systemd unit files in the Pacemaker component, as well as the ability to track package installations and upgrades using audit events.

Complete Story

Source

UPDATE: The developer provided some clarifications here. I think the key point to take away is this “Last but not least, we are shelving the Linux port, not outright killing it. This doesn’t mean we won’t do it after the launch.”

ORIGINAL: Book of Demons [Steam], a dungeon crawling hack and slash with deck-building will no longer get a native Linux port. Steam Play is part of the reason.

It won’t be the last game to do this I’m sure. At least in this case, they aren’t pulling support for an already released game like Human: Fall Flat as Book of Demons didn’t have a public Linux version. Anyway, writing on the Steam forum the developer noted a few vague issues they were having.

Things like “We had as many different issues with the build as testers. With each flavor of Linux came different issues.” along with “Right now everything indicates that Linux port would be very high maintenance.”. I always find these types of statements highly unhelpful, unless they actually say why that is. Let’s be clear on this again too, you do not need to support all Linux distributions, support the most popular.

They went on to mention the issue of users only getting a single choice between Native or Proton, since Steam has no built-in way of picking between Steam Play or a Native build. An issue that seems to be mentioned more lately by gamers and developers. So, they said they will “focus our efforts on supporting Steam Play and Proton.”.;

This does bring up some interesting thoughts. To be clear, I’m very open minded about Steam Play especially since sales will still show up as Linux and that I do like.

However, there’s a lot that’s unclear right now. When developers say they will support Steam Play/Proton, how will they do that? It would at the very least, require them to test every single patch they do on a Linux system through Steam Play to ensure they haven’t broken it. Anything less than that and I wouldn’t say they were actually supporting it. If it is broken, finding out why might end up being a hassle and hold them back and end up causing more issues. They can’t really guarantee any degree of support since it is Valve and co handling it for them, the way I see it is that the game developer is not really doing anything.

Source