That is a very interesting point actually. That Microsoft is a sponsor of the Linux foundation is not just a plus point in this discussion, but also a motivator for the Foundation to report positively.
The Linux Foundation is a joke. Hell, even Oracle is a 'platinum member', and there's no company on earth as aggressively hostile towards FLOSS than Oracle.
I'm really surprised this thread is so heavily upvoted here and on reddit.
The Linux Foundation is literally a lobbying agency for major coporations, why does it matter what's their opinion?
I mean The Linux Foundation president doesn't even use linux on his machine lol [1].
This should say everything you need to know about the foundation really.
LWN publishes regulator "kernel development statistics" which counts commits on a per-company basis and Oracle shows up consistently. Membership in the Linux Foundation seems entirely justified.
I've worked for a non-profit in a controversial space (interaction of faith and science). While my colleagues always strived to tell what they saw as truth, there was always an acknowledgement—unstated—that donors' reactions informed our approaches to addressing issues. Not that we compromised our values, but we couldn't operate in a vacuum.
I agree, I made a similar comment here. I think it lacks integrity for the foundation to make such a statement knowing Microsoft is one of their board members as well as being a Platinum member.
Some companies like Blizzard use torrents for downloading updates (though you can disable it in the launcher settings IIRC).
The hurdle is that need to verify that each file isn't modified. Otherwise someone could spread game hacks by modifying the game files and sharing them. E.g. make other players the drop all their items or what else the modified client does..
The simplest solution would be to use a single singed file per torrent. However, that way users need to keep a copy for sharing after extracting the contents. In your example ~3GB occupied on the user's hard-disk space in order to safe you some traffic.
The other thing to consider is esp. for F2P you lose potential customers if the download takes too long (and users abort). So unless you are sure that enough users are sharing I wouldn't recommend it.
While I believe in testing, I doubt that the new shade of blue is solely responsible for an extra $200m a year in revenue.
Even if all the testing was done at the same time, the period with the alleged revenue increase was obviously later and during a whole year. So during that year a lot of other things including external market situations influenced the revenue change. Meaning there is no clear link between the shade of blue change and the revenue increase.
Ofc a change of blue worth $200m / year makes a better headline, even if it's rubbish talk.
It would be really weird to see anything but a positive reaction from a consortium which receives a substantial amount of money from Microsoft.