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.
i would too tbh
he’s just changed it to a Creative Commons licence that prohibits packaging and selling of the emulator, nothing that anybody outside of people selling dodgy romsets online are going to need to worry about
Creative Commons licenses aren’t suitable for software and applying them like that is an extremely bad behaviour.
Could you elaborate on that? I’m not up to date on FOSS / open source licensing.
From Creative Commons FAQ:
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.
Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.
Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here.
Also, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.
While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.
Huh! I had no idea. Thank you!
The licence thats he’s switched to is CC BY-NC-ND. It does not allow modifications. The ND in BY-NC-ND means “No derivatives”. It’s just so stupid, he should’ve gone with GPLv3.
So the project is just source available?
nothing that anybody outside of people selling dodgy romsets online are going to need to worry about
And Linux distro maintainers, Flatpak, and libretro and a lot of other projects that rely on repackaging or integrating the code in a bigger project.
Even NVIDIA has a more flexible license that at least lets distros bundle it in the repositories.
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
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
licenses are only as useful as your ability to enforce them in court
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
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.
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.
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
https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/
also almost every /vg/emugen thread is full of “danny drama”
Remember Marak Squires, the author of
faker.jsandcolor.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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Stenzek gets a ton of abuse from the emulation community that is undeserved. I remember when he made PlayStation 2 emulation on Android possible with AetherSX2 under another username/alias, a massive technological leap, and the community treated him like trash. Moves like this are just in response to the entitlement and poor behaviour that some people directed towards Stenzek. Yes it sucks for the rest of us who behave appropriately online, but none of this would be happening if others treated the guy with respect in the first place.
Emulation community and treating the people who make emulation possible like shit, name a more iconic duo
This is not the emulation community per-se, but what happened to Near was absolutely heartbreaking.
Open source devs are often difficult, single-minded, and poorly socialized, people, but the entitlement from users is enough to make anyone go insane.
You’re not wrong, but the underlying traits that make them that way is also what drives them to build FOSS software instead of maximizing their income potential at any and all costs. Meanwhile, most users just suuuuuuuck.
It shouldn’t fall on developers, but maybe the community should normalize finding a willing representative willing to listen to all the hot garbage the community throws at devs and have that person monitor various channels then relay only the relevant stuff to the Dev. Cause as it stands, difficult or not, FOSS devs are working for free and dont deserve the hate they get.
Absolutely and I will be the first to offer praise. Honestly, I think the fact that FOSS devs trend weird and neurotic is not because of anything special with Open Source but because the non-neurotic ones are pulling down 300K salaries at Google. If big tech wasn’t absorbing all of their employees mental capacity many of them would be doing FOSS for fun.
Stenzek is Tahlreth?! I had no idea. It’s such a shame what happened. AetherSX2 was magic when it dropped. Thought Android PS2 emulation was literally impossible on current or even near future hardware until it just suddenly appeared.
I have no context here, but isn’t getting a similar level of pushback from the community under a second alias evidence of some of it being justified? Or did people somehow discover it was the same person and then the abuse started?
That’s what I’m wondering.
I haven’t heard any reports of or seen any abuse for emulators like Xenia, RPCS3, Dolphin, Citra, etc. I wonder if this is something unique/specific to people finding out it’s Stenzek, or if it’s more widespread than we realize?
Personally, I do think non-permissive licenses aren’t nice, and I do think there should be criticisms, skepticism, and concerns to be voiced about that. At the same time, if it’s the owners project, he is free to do with it as he wishes. Then again, if something has a large enough of a community, you could argue that it’s no longer just their project. But I understand that if you want to prevent people profiting off of your work (and your contributors work), a no-commercial license does make sense. It’s a complex situation.
What’s so bad about not permitting commercial uses?
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.
it’s not really “open source” anymore per OSI, specifically #6: https://opensource.org/osd
He changed the license without consulting the other committers. Other that that not much.
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).
He claims to have gotten permission from the contributors… not sure where you heard that they didn’t.
