Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

A bit of a discussion on upcoming technologies in the Syntensity FOSS gaming platform, and some suggestions as to how it could make a complete gaming experience that would help loosen Valve's deathgrip on the online gaming industry, using Free Software.

Ubuntu on tablets is the latest Ubuntu platform from Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution. Barely two months ago, the company announced Ubuntu for smartphones. Before that, was Ubuntu for TV and before that, too, was Ubuntu for Android.

So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell.

In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary "content delivery service" known as "Steam" is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse's mouth. In addition the actual client and "Steam-works" being brought to Apple's operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games.

Valve has taken a Left 4 Dead-style shotgun to rumours that it is working on a Linux compatible version of its Steam platform.

What about the Steam Machine, the hardware platform that will be released in 2014? For that, we know that based on the quote below, there will be more than one version.

Luckily for our gaming customers, Valve has forced our hand. That is, they have released an entirely rewritten version of Steam today. And, unfortunately, it does not work at all in our existing CrossOver Games releases. And since Steam is a large part of what our customers use CrossOver Games for, we've been forced to rush out a release to provide that support.

We have our hands on the bash launcher used by Valve's Steam client for Mac OS X that was recently announced. While such scripts are usually insignificant, there is something interesting within it and that is explicit support for Linux.

THERE'S PLENTY of consternation floating around the Steam forums this morning as open sauce geeks get het up over Valve's persistant refusal to port its popular Steam game-delivery client to something a little more penguin-based.