A bit more followup on the story ran yesterday about Powerplay concerning Valve, Cisco, Epic and many others. The official website has now opened up for you to look at. Also, the guys at PlanetFortress have a bit more Q&A on just what is going on and what Valve is after. On top of that, many people were curious aboout the lack of id Software on that list, I fired some email to Gabe and here's his response:

Yahn's been talking with John quite a bit about this.   John told Yahn he wants to take a stab at rewriting the Linux IP stack and a soft modem driver to see how much latency he can remove, and use that to pressure Microsoft into cleaning up the Windows stack.  That would be really useful data to have.

Our list of things and John's list of things are pretty much identical, but John passed this time around on being part of the public announcement. Yahn's take was that John was just tired of answering questions from the press...<snip>

Certainly with everything John has done already (e.g. OpenGL) he's paid his dues into the next century, so if thinks it's other peoples' turn to carry the flag for a bit, that's totally justified.