Great marketing, let me tell you, our Apple drones are so upset over this, they are planing to buy another Mac, just in case one got erased.

Is there a C++ library somewhere ? They have chosen GPL so probably somebody could make a nice and useful C++ fork out of this.

heavily modded Quake engine

Interesting, I didn't know that "Source engine" is a Quake engine derivative.

Ok, but the guy was talking about starting his own Steam-like distribution service. My point was to play Counter-Strike (source) I was required to install Steam (good marketing of Steam itself), now to start "competition" with Steam service would clearly require to have similar AAA game in your offering already and that might be a problem. Forget things like known publishers committing their catalogs into some new 3th party service.

Exactly that is my point, Valve already had great games to start with, without these games Steam would have a hard time to proliferate.

Maybe, but are you sure Direct2Drive is not owned by 2K, EA, UBI or some other 'parent' publisher? I would not be surprised.

Also, to come up with a highly acclaimed game that would draw people into your new digital store is sure possible, but stunt like this needs some high caliber game like GTA or Doom 3 to succeed.

In other words to start a competing store with Steam might be problematic.

Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to start up their own, competing service.

Sure and LOL, they were the first carrying titles like Counter-Strike and Half-life, pretty much forcing people to install Steam in order to play these highly desired games. NOBODY would install Steam without some good game already in. You can try to start a competing company with no such games, good luck.

more than happy with something like Open Office, or Google Docs

Most users actually use what is pre-installed, a clear attempt for MS Office to gain new grounds. Why do you think the IE6 is so widespread still ? It is the default bundled browser on Windows XP. This is not a good news for Open Office or Google.

Behold the Paice LLC company structure. No employees, management only. Also they are located at "Shady drive" street no kidding.

Good point. Mod parent up pls.

Extinction event or cancer ? That's easy to choose.

By 2036 I will be dead already, along with bunch of other fellow aging Slashdotters, therefore I could not care less.

I agree that reusing some existing API is the way to do it, but I meant to use some other "CryptoAPI" that exists on Linux or elsewhere (OpenSSL?), I haven't written a word about creating their own. Also to calculate checksums, hashes or randomize keys you do not need anything platform, system or OS dependent I would presume, any such a *NIX code (already in use there anyway) should do the trick be easy to port to Windows.

CryptoAPI is easily avoidable, just use Unix libs for Hashing, Keys and Singins. I am surpriced that those multiplatform apps like Chrome are using this at all.

Partly agreed, but if the app is HTML/Java and can run in a web-browser like environment then you can find such an app on the web anyway and already. What is the point ? We are talking about the added value of AppStore grade applications that somebody would like to pay for, they are barring open source/free software -- they want money -- while openly promoting low-end application interface (web) that can't bring the added value, this is plain stupid, sorry, but this got failure drawn all over.