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 @[email protected] 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?
Surprised to hear that with the popularity of Retroarch on the Steam Deck
AFAIK retroarch uses swanstation, a hard fork specifically for retroarch created in 2024 when duckstation switched from GPL to a source available license. Also retroarch alternatively has the beetle core which is also a pretty good ps1 emulator
Did not realize swanstation was not the same as Duckstation! In my experience Beetle is good for accuracy but does not run well on lower end systems.
So then, really, swanstation is better anyway.
Well, swanstation doesn’t work standalone and some people have said it performs worse, but it’s not like you need a very powerful system anyway
Retroarch also uses his code illegally, they copied the code and removed his copyright info from it. That’s a big part of his beef.
That’s simply untrue, duckstation changed license from GPL3 to CC on September 1st 2024, while swanstation retains the original GPL3 license from September 11th 2019.
So the beef is that they kept using the code as they were before the license change, which is their right under the original GPL3 license.
If anything is legally questionable here it is the duckstation re-licensing to CC because the author of duckstation is not the author of PRs made before the change to CC, thus they might not have the legal right to change the license to those parts of the code without the assent of the individual PR authors (in most jurisdictions I’m aware of at least). I didn’t see any Contributor License Agreement in the repo, which would be the usual way to acquire this assent.Edit: Context somebody posted upthread. They rewrote parts of the code and got some contributors to agree to the license change. Remains unclear if that covers everything even to the author apparently, but fair enough I guess.
The question is not just the license, it’s the copyright notice at the top of each file that has information on who authored the file and when, retroarch removed the information and replaced with their own, you are not allowed to do this under gpl
Again the git history does not seem to agree with this. If you compare the history of analog_controller.cpp for example in duckstation and swanstation you will find that the in-file license header was added 3 years ago while the latest common change between the files is from 4 years ago. In other words swanstation is using a version of the source code from before the license change, not removing the license change.
If you have any source for these accusations please post it, because as you have relayed them so far they seem to be untrue.
My understanding is that they forked it after he had a different, earlier crashout about their retroarch core and handling user support. He changed the entire license to prevent them from continuing to use his code to make a core. Then they hard forked from before the license change and made the swanstation core. So not illegal, but spiteful as all hell.
That said, forking it illegally wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for the retroarch devs. It’s entirely possible I don’t have accurate info on the order of events etc.
But I’ll be real, while I care about these devs as people and wish they would just get some community members to act as filters for support requests (seems to be the leading cause of dev burnout)… emulator dev drama isn’t worth getting wrapped up in.
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.
Overall it’s actually huge, significantly more than unix or NT based systems.
Desktop share alone is up to 5% this month in the US. Mobile phone share is over 60%, server share over 80%, supercomputer share is 100% of the 500 most powerful.
They use Arch btw!
I think Arch would be more popular if more people stated that they use it. Every chance they get. I’m sure that wouldn’t be annoying.
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.
flatpak
