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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Yes but the licences are compatible, so you can dual license it under both. Just say code is GPL and everything else (eg documentation, images, etc) is CC BY-SA
I'm pretty it has been forked to the moon and back before he went insane.
