There's been a bit of a furore in the emulation community lately centred around the PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, which has now seen two license changes recently.
… 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.
As a maintainer of few AUR packages this is always so hurtful.
Where does this position come from? Packaging is the avenue that people using any linux distro use to get your software.
This also my first time hearing that packages (re)building GPL code have to mark the packages as modified in some way. I can understand that being a valid concern (if it is one) but that’s a problem that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
For every one maintainer coming to your github issues with their problems there is probably shitton of patches and time spent on making your program work with the given distro.
There is very much an “expected” source for this. Retroarch.
For those not aware, retroarch is a frontend for emulators that takes things farther than tools like ES-DE by requiring packaging and code changes to hook in to all the retroarch libraries to handle things like controller mapping, achievement servers, and hacks/cheats. The lead “developer” on retroarch has a LONG history of transphobia and other forms of bigotry toward emulator developers. REAL hate campaigns with the goal of either forcing emulator developers to specially support retroarch or to stop being developers so that retroarch can continue to claim that they have all the best emulators (even if they are years out of date relative to standalone…).
Duckstation in particular was targeted pretty heavily by them but stenzek (the lead dev) is a straight up G who fought back and refused to support the hateful shitheads. Which led to the “swanstation” fork for retroarch purposes. I haven’t done enough research on the difference in the fork but it seems to be significantly behind Duckstation in terms of features while letting retroarch claim they have the best. And if the repo I found from a quick google is THE swanstation repo… yeah.
that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
As can be seen in the article as well as the issue thread and general contributions: Stenzek did not throw any maintainers “overboard”. All contributors were contacted and either agreed or their code was rewritten. That is 100% the proper procedure.
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
The issue is not the “maintainers” unless you count the transphobic shitstains at retroarch as “maintainers”. The problem is the same thing that faces so many other emulator developers where retroarch distributes outdated and broken versions and then punts user support to the developers. Which means periodic waves of “Ugh, your emulator sucks. Why don’t you have feature X?” when Feature X has been in the emulator for years at that point but the “maintainers” at retroarch couldn’t be bothered to update their “core”.
That said, I do expect a third license change before this is all said and done. Because, based on the linked issue, stenzek et al are still perfectly happy with developmental forks for MRs and the like and there is likely a better license that is exactly what they want, rather than “close enough”.
At the end of the day: Ideology is great. But please understand the human aspect of things and maybe do some research to make sure you aren’t just arguing that people should bend over backwards to placate people who run campaigns of hate to force other developers to contribute to their project with a patreon that doesn’t pay out for that work (outside of rare exceptions).
I never did like using RetroArch. I always thought it was overly convoluted. Also whenever I looked something up I was trying to figure out, a lot of the explanations I’d find would be oddly rude and off-putting.
If the things you’ve mentioned are true, then it kinda makes sense.
Yeah, RetroArch is something best used/enjoyed in spite of the lead devs. There’s a lot of really cool and unique stuff it does, but the main devs have pulled some real bullshit over time.
Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.
He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.
As far as I understood things, he’s always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.
Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I’ve got them blocked and I’m not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.
Emphasis mine, snipped from the authors comment
As a maintainer of few AUR packages this is always so hurtful.
Where does this position come from? Packaging is the avenue that people using any linux distro use to get your software. This also my first time hearing that packages (re)building GPL code have to mark the packages as modified in some way. I can understand that being a valid concern (if it is one) but that’s a problem that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
For every one maintainer coming to your github issues with their problems there is probably shitton of patches and time spent on making your program work with the given distro.
Mentioned in the other thread but:
There is very much an “expected” source for this. Retroarch.
For those not aware, retroarch is a frontend for emulators that takes things farther than tools like ES-DE by requiring packaging and code changes to hook in to all the retroarch libraries to handle things like controller mapping, achievement servers, and hacks/cheats. The lead “developer” on retroarch has a LONG history of transphobia and other forms of bigotry toward emulator developers. REAL hate campaigns with the goal of either forcing emulator developers to specially support retroarch or to stop being developers so that retroarch can continue to claim that they have all the best emulators (even if they are years out of date relative to standalone…).
Duckstation in particular was targeted pretty heavily by them but stenzek (the lead dev) is a straight up G who fought back and refused to support the hateful shitheads. Which led to the “swanstation” fork for retroarch purposes. I haven’t done enough research on the difference in the fork but it seems to be significantly behind Duckstation in terms of features while letting retroarch claim they have the best. And if the repo I found from a quick google is THE swanstation repo… yeah.
As can be seen in the article as well as the issue thread and general contributions: Stenzek did not throw any maintainers “overboard”. All contributors were contacted and either agreed or their code was rewritten. That is 100% the proper procedure.
The issue is not the “maintainers” unless you count the transphobic shitstains at retroarch as “maintainers”. The problem is the same thing that faces so many other emulator developers where retroarch distributes outdated and broken versions and then punts user support to the developers. Which means periodic waves of “Ugh, your emulator sucks. Why don’t you have feature X?” when Feature X has been in the emulator for years at that point but the “maintainers” at retroarch couldn’t be bothered to update their “core”.
That said, I do expect a third license change before this is all said and done. Because, based on the linked issue, stenzek et al are still perfectly happy with developmental forks for MRs and the like and there is likely a better license that is exactly what they want, rather than “close enough”.
At the end of the day: Ideology is great. But please understand the human aspect of things and maybe do some research to make sure you aren’t just arguing that people should bend over backwards to placate people who run campaigns of hate to force other developers to contribute to their project with a patreon that doesn’t pay out for that work (outside of rare exceptions).
I never did like using RetroArch. I always thought it was overly convoluted. Also whenever I looked something up I was trying to figure out, a lot of the explanations I’d find would be oddly rude and off-putting.
If the things you’ve mentioned are true, then it kinda makes sense.
Yeah, RetroArch is something best used/enjoyed in spite of the lead devs. There’s a lot of really cool and unique stuff it does, but the main devs have pulled some real bullshit over time.
Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.
He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.
As far as I understood things, he’s always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.
Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I’ve got them blocked and I’m not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.