Creator Of PS1 Emulator DuckStation Threatens To "Shut The Whole Thing Down" Following License Change

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'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.

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

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.
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?
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.

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

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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Iirc - Duckstation dev is the same one who did Aether2x right?
- It won’t effect the core.
  
  You sure that's the right effect/affect? Left behind?
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.
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

Which GPL violations is he referring to?

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.
- Yes exactly, but which parties? Who actually violated the GPLof Duckstation?

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).