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.
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 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!
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
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?
Kind of, yes.
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.
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 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.
Soo, how exactly CC solves the issue? I suspect it wouldn’t stop those who ignored a much more lax GPL, tbh
Unfortunate. It’s available as a RetroArch core isn’t it? I wonder how that will effect things
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
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.
licenses are only as useful as your ability to enforce them in court
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
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 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.
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).
