Kinda insane how many people in a nominally open source community are defending this guy for switching to a proprietary license. If DuckStation gets shut down then I say good riddance. It is not the only PS1 emulator in town and I will not miss the endless flow of Stenzek-related drama.
I was wondering - does the enforcement of no-derivation prevent the applying of patches and file substitutions, while building projects in a substitute build farm? As someone who packages for Guix and requires ELF-patching, I would be violating the new license, right?
Yes, that kind of packaging is exactly what he is fighting!
I'm pretty sure it has been forked to the moon and back before he went insane.
Not sure this qualifies as insane. Seems more like a self-defense maneuver to me. People have harassed and stalked this man to an absurd degree over features they wanted and bugs that bothered them that in some cases only existed in forks like Swanstation.
This is on top of this guy working a full time job. He can do what he wants and give away free code to the world on whatever terms he sees fit.
Basically, he got too famous and entitled assholes started treating him like a public slave.
It sucks and I'm sad to see him turn the project away from a true FOSS license, but I'd rather he contribute public code than not.
Unfortunate. It's available as a RetroArch core isn't it? I wonder how that will effect things
It won't effect the core.
The last time he threatened this was the last time he changed his license, because of retroarch making a core of Duckstation in the first place. The Duckstation dev seems to have a real problem with anyone using his code, down to declining bug fix pull requests because he was pissed off at the people complaining about the bug in the first place.
He claimed Retroarch violated the licensing when they made it a core. Not sure if they actually did or not. Wouldn't put it past them as the Retroarch lead devs have done shit like that before. So then they forked his code from before the original license change and used it to make the Swanstation core.
I honestly thought that the Duckstation dev had followed through with his threat years ago and had stopped development.
Either way, it's best to just ignore emulator dev drama like this. Just use the best software and ignore the authors. Unfortunately a lot of them have personality and/or psychological issues that lead to a disproportianate amount of drama.
Either way, it's best to just ignore emulator dev drama like this. Just use the best software and ignore the authors.
That’s how I feel about Lemmy lol
Wouldn't put it past them as the Retroarch lead devs have done shit like that before.
Do you have examples? I usually stay out of dev drama as well but I just started using Retroarch and I'm curious. I also don't want to support people that abuse the community, so I'd like to be informed.
https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/
also almost every /vg/emugen thread is full of "danny drama"
Remember Marak Squires, the author of faker.js and color.js? Dude is unhinged in real life, tried making a bomb, nearly got himself killed, and was arrested for arson.
The author of Anarch, Miloslav Číž, also known as drummyfish and tastyfish, is another one of those weirdos - he's one of those stereotypical - "Go read my manifesto" type of guy. He's got his own website (warning: anti-LGBTQ+, social construct denialism, pro-pedophilia). He's also unhinged in the sense that he's posted lots of weird, disturbing shit (warning: blood, naked 3D model) online.
Free speech has to be absolute
Movements such as (removed irrelevant part) shouldn't be supported
Make up your mind, my dude.
Reading further into his... thoughts... I think he's far beyond what I would consider "unhinged", and considering his 14th point, probably in possession of hard drives that authorities might want to investigate.
I also discovered that there was a Slovak MEP by the same name who was really passionate about chicken legs.
Homophobia and pedophilia, name a more iconic duo
Their source code repo contains a copy of libogc for wii/gc builds because they were annoyed at us. And i do mean a copy. Not a reference, or a sub-module, a full on copy that they build before building the wii/gc executable.
Their own issue, as long as we dont get reports of their broken shit...
Then there are the multiple times they cloned emu repos and butchered them into cores. Or the fact they force the core interface on emulators making them bad.
Retroarch is a nice project from a far, but the closer you look, the more you see huge ass cracks in the project, held down with duct-tape
It’s strange to me that if the guy has such a problem with how open source software works (such as his code being used (ideally with license being followed), bugs, pull requests, etc), why did he not just keep it closed source?
Seems to me he either didn’t understand how open source works, or he got in way over his head.
You’re right, though, best to ignore.
for some reason a lot of emudevs are very hostile to the whole idea of forking. mame also famously hates retroarch for it, as well as inolen from redream and skmp from reicast/nullcast, probably more.
this isn't even the first project that an emudev has directly relicensed or even shut down their entire emulator for over a retroarch fork, which is usually done in the first place due to maintenance problems with the original emudev.
as others have said, the whole scene just seems to attract the kind of genius that too often steps over that fine line. out of the probably couple dozen emudevs I know, the vast majority have explicitly stated themselves that they suffer from severe mental health issues.
I recommend using a true Free and Open Source Playstation emulator, such as from the multi emulator Mednafen. RetroArch has it as a core as well, rebranded as Beetle PSX, which I use since years. It is getting updates and games work as good as in Duckstation. Only it is a bit more heavy on processor power and its upscaling requires more graphics power as well. I use it in software mode anyway and the compatibility and emulation accuracy should be mostly equal.
Just in case someone wants to use an alternative.
Iirc - Duckstation dev is the same one who did Aether2x right?
So, officially no. But there are ongoing theories in the r/emulationonandroid subreddit that they are.
I think it could be either way, but it's unlikely that they are the same person. In both cases, harassment caused them to shut there projects down, which could be a reasanobale coincidence, or could be indicative of a larger harassment campaign.
Ahh so it's still never been confirmed then. The Aether2x event and the Reddit third-party event happened relatively close together, so I never got closure.
Sad that the emulation community has such a prevalent amount of vocal people who go around expectantly harassing developers. Such a large part of the community seems so nice and wholesome, but there is a significant portion that is also extremely vile and consistently ruins it for the rest of us.
Edit: Oh, and thank you for responding.
It won’t effect the core.
You sure that's the right effect/affect? Left behind?
Seems like you were the one left behind brother.
What's your favourite flavour of glue?
The new hard-fork by libretro is called Swanstation. That's what they'll be using now.
Good to know. I'll have to look into it further
One thing I'm missing in all this, did the dude change the license from GPL without the other contributors express permission? That on itself would be a massive violation of the GPL
licenses are only as useful as your ability to enforce them in court
He says he has had permission. Given that it's a mostly 1 person project it's possibly true.
The repo alone has 114 contributors, and that's assuming no one copied code from any other project. It's not that small.
A lot of contributors of FOSS projects make small changes that aren't copyrightable.
He claims to have permission from every developer. And if he forgot someone (how do he forget, if there is a literal list of who contributed), then the person should please talk to him. Also he claims to have rewritten lot of the parts where he did not have permission or he just wanted to rewrite.
I assume he did all of that and the code is pure. But I highly dislike this move. This guy cares more about others making money of his project, than the Open Source community. In fact, he is hostile to Open Source now.
well, at least former versions are still GPL
Which GPL violations is he referring to?
from the article:
I am well aware of how licenses work. That's why I changed, to make it very clear and a deterrent due to certain parties violating the old license, by not attributing and stripping my copyright. Packagers being collateral damage was a beneficial side-effect, considering they don't clearly mark their versions as modified (also a GPL requirement), break functionality, and expect upstream to provide support.
Yes exactly, but which parties? Who actually violated the GPLof Duckstation?
There was a game company called Arcade1UP. I think that they violated the license, so this guy went all nuts. Earlier, he was also being harassed for AetherSX2 under a different alias.
Damn. Big shame. GPL violations are far too fucking common.
What's so bad about not permitting commercial uses?
it's not really "open source" anymore per OSI, specifically #6: https://opensource.org/osd
Bigger problem is the No Derivatives clause of the CC licence, as compiling or forking the code creates a derivative, so it's now a project nobody is allowed to use (or distribute) in any other form than their exact, precompiled releases.
In fact, as the GitHub terms of service specifically require you to allow forking - as recently demonstrated by the WinAmp project - I wonder if CC ND is even possible to be used in GitHub in the first place.
He changed the license without consulting the other committers. Other that that not much.
He claims to have gotten permission from the contributors... not sure where you heard that they didn't.
He said somewhere that he did ask a top contributor if they care, and they didn't. He also said that he rewrote a bunch of code to be able to change the license.
I can't verify this, but it doesn't seem like he infringend on someones copyright. Small changes (e.g. a few lines) don't even (necessarily) qualify for copyright (just like the few sentences I wrote here likely don't).
To be fair, there are NC software licenses out there under umbrellas like post-open source, copyfair, & copyfarleft. Creative Commons is wrong for this application—& ND is even more questionable—but choosing to follow these other movements is something you can choose to do or support if the noncommercial clause aligns with your philosophy (but incompatibles with GPL & friends can prove difficult).
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