This developer appears to have accepted contributions from over 100 other people prior to having a change of heart about the GPL and
unilaterallyswitching the project to a non-free license (CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives).Somehow I doubt that all of the other contributors actually agreed to that license change 🤔Bonus 🤡-points for making a bunch of unrelated changes to source code in the “Misc: Update copyright headers” commit.
edit: i stand corrected, thanks to @LiveLM@lemmy.zip i see the developer wrote:
I have the approval of prior contributors, and if I did somehow miss you, then please advise me so I can rewrite that code. I didn’t spend several weekends rewriting various parts for no reason.
It’s odd they didn’t mention that in the commit where they changed the license.
🥂 to whoever carries on development of the last GPL version, and/or develops other free software emulators. and 🤌 to people continuing to contribute to this one after it became non-free.
Somehow I doubt that all of the other contributors actually agreed to that license change 🤔
It seems he did in fact get their permission, and rewrote code he couldn’t relicense
heh, i’ve seen almost exactly this break a dev before. it was the ion3 dev, tuomo valkonnen. he was probably never entirely OK, but eventually he ragequit opensource, installed windows, deleted all his opensource projects and went incommunicado.
what pushed him over the edge was distros shipping packages of somewhat older versions of his windowmanager (so, not updating their packages as soon as he released a new stable version) and then users filing bugreports for bugs he’d already fixed.
I totally get the frustration of getting pointless bug reports.
I’ve seen many repos with a “you must reproduce your issue on the version we release here to report” policy, I wonder if that could be a solution.
Maybe together with a GitHub bot to scan logs posted on the issues and inform the reporter about that…he had the policy, he just couldnt deal with the idiots who refused to read it
Much appreciated. The author’s comment for that commit does not paint the full picture.
The comment about analogies is so good.
This is yet another example of someone being exhausted by the free and open source software community and specifically the Linux part of that community. At one point, we’re gonna need to take a long look at our communities and wonder why the fuck is it that this keeps happening? The amount of shit that maintainers have to deal with constantly is a massive issue. We have a cultural problem, one that we seemingly refuse to acknowledge.
Recently, a project called Kapitano got abandoned for pretty much the same reasons. Some kernel maintainers left. There was the whole Asahi Linux debacle. With Asahi Lina, notably, basically quitting Linux development altogether from what I understand at this point.
We keep seeing burnouts, people giving up in frustration, getting harassed and so on. This is not okay. How many times does it need to happen before we finally decide that enough is enough?
Those other examples are not the same situation. People can be exhausted of many things and isn’t really conducive to identifying the problem. Can you describe the culture in a way that doesn’t boil down to a larger societal problem? The differences I do see is that there is, unlike with private software, a place here to communicate with developers directly, that there is much less of a buffer between devs and users (no company) so that they receive the direct blunt of the messages, and lack of management (devs likely wont be as skilled managing public interactions as someone whose profession it is). For this, Linux users are more savvy and more able to file issues, so it makes sense that they received many more issues.
I think this is survivorship bias due to transparency. There are endless people that quit jobs like Asahi did due to internal bureaucracy that you would never hear from, because who elses email chains are public and the product is for all people instead of a demographic?
2% market share
Overall maybe (although even then, I think it is somewhat higher than that), but I’d bet money that usage is higher among people who emulate. The Steam Deck is a big part of that.
He has a point. Package managers are extremely stupid. Installing stuff on Linux is stupid. We need a 15th standard. Or one making all the existing ones work together.
retvrn to downloading mysterious .exes on the internet and running them
I download .debs all the time off this or that GitHub.
Not before chmod +x 'ing them first!
Are you telling me I’m not just supposed to type sudo apt install ./thing-that-i-wanna-install?
That’s basically what I do on Linux anyway except you have to give the install permissions and occasionally to tar -xyzabc and then build something and then add it to your path and then create a shortcut and then give it an icon.
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