That was my reading of it as well. Maybe a bit of technical information tutoring to get them up and running. I would also imagine that Valve is contributing upstream from SteamOS back to Arch.
By supporting
work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on
them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
Seems pretty explicit to me. Valve is allowing some arch linux contributors to work freelance for valve and get paid money to work on the things they would otherwise be working on for free. This allows these contributors to spend much more time working on these things because they can treat this work as the-thing-I-do-to-put-food-in-my-mouth rather than something extra they would do on the scraps of time they have on the side.
I guess Valve gave some servers to Arch for building/signing packages 🤔
This sounds like Valve is paying devs to work full time on arch, and thus managing to achive more than volunteers could.
That was my reading of it as well. Maybe a bit of technical information tutoring to get them up and running. I would also imagine that Valve is contributing upstream from SteamOS back to Arch.
That’s not how I read it at all
Seems pretty explicit to me. Valve is allowing some arch linux contributors to work freelance for valve and get paid money to work on the things they would otherwise be working on for free. This allows these contributors to spend much more time working on these things because they can treat this work as the-thing-I-do-to-put-food-in-my-mouth rather than something extra they would do on the scraps of time they have on the side.