• penquin@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    I’m pretty sure it has been forked to the moon and back before he went insane.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • Corroded@leminal.space
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    2 months ago

    Unfortunate. It’s available as a RetroArch core isn’t it? I wonder how that will effect things

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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

      • skoberlink@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

          • rtxn@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

        • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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

      • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • refalo@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          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.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • averyminya@beehaw.org
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            2 months ago

            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.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        It won’t effect the core.

        You sure that’s the right effect/affect? Left behind?

  • leopold@lemmy.kde.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    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

    • teolan@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      He says he has had permission. Given that it’s a mostly 1 person project it’s possibly true.

      • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        The repo alone has 114 contributors, and that’s assuming no one copied code from any other project. It’s not that small.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        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).

      • refalo@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        He claims to have gotten permission from the contributors… not sure where you heard that they didn’t.

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      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).