Being privately owned by a person who is a video game enthusiast really helps. Gabe already has ‘fuck you’ money and just wants to make video games and gadgets (and, apparently, deep sea submarines!).

If Valve is ever sold it’ll go the route of every other publicly traded company.

I’m so glad to be away from corporate IT and working with small teams of highly technical people where every request isn’t “ok I’ll fill out the paperwork” but "Hmm, we could do it like this: " We just created a small network, gapped from everything else, where you can just use the bandwidth but cannot possibly affect the production network. Since our bandwidth utilization is generally around 5% of maximum it’s not issue to grab things using a 10Gb chunk of a few hundreds of Gb of bandwidth. The traffic is tagged with a low priority QOS packet so even in the worst case it will never affect network operation.

It’s been ages since I did IT. If I had a user who wanted to run Linux then I knew that, on average, they were going to cause me a lot less headaches with random user issues so I wouldn’t mind being flexible. Endpoint security will be different, but a lot of network security is handled through network devices that don’t care what the client is.