The creator of the popular PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, known as stenzek, has made significant changes to the project's licensing, causing controversy in the emulation community. Originally open-source under the General Public License, DuckStation's license was changed first to PolyFormStrict License and then to CC-BY-NC-ND. These changes prohibit commercial use and derivatives of the emulator, including packaging it for distribution.Stenzek explained that the license changes were made to deter parties who had violated the previous license by not attributing the work and stripping copyright information. He also mentioned that preventing packagers from distributing modified versions was a 'beneficial side-effect' due
  • JackbyDevEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Fuck the OSI. They’ve done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all “software used to deploy this software” being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license… and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would “restrict usage” because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft…

    I’d disagree with you there somewhat. It was all discussed in the mailing list. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/thread.html#3603

    I’ve dug through this and the discussion for SSPLv2 a bit because I used to disagree with their decision. The criticism is that it accomplishes the alleged goal of discrimination against SaaS providers specifically by doing what you’re saying.

    I’ll check my notes some more, I could’ve sworn I had a link to an email specifically saying as much but I can’t find it right now. I’ll poke around and see if I can find it.