Gamers can be the most entitled demanding assholes. Arch users can be the most annoying arrogant and conceited people to exist online.
I wouldn’t dare imagine dealing with the unholy mix of arch gamers min-maxing social skills for inferiority complex.
I’d rather drop support too.
Is there a specific interaction that made them angry?
Is there a specific interaction that made them angry?
Stenzek’s feeling got hurt when DuckStation was still proper open source software and people used the software fully in accordance with its license, i.e. they distributed modifications and not all permitted modifications were the most polished ones, so he felt that they give his name a bad reputation. Again: Stenzek released DuckStation under a license that explicitly allows this.
So he rage quit open source and released new DuckStation versions under a very restrictive “source available to look but not touch” license that’s so insanely restrictive, Linux distributions are not allowed to make their own packages. So they ship the old version that works just fine because PlayStation 1 emulation was figured out very long ago. Stenzek feels that they should not ship the old version (which they are fully entitled to) and instead make a special exception for his software alone to point their users to DuckStation’s website where instead of acquiring the emulator from their package manager (or “app store” in case you’re not familiar with that term), Linux users should take extra steps to manually download and install DuckStation.
And since users may not know about this rift, they may post bug reports and feature ideas to Stenzek, even though these bugs may have been long fixed by non-open source DuckStation.
Basically: Stenzek did not read the license he picked for his software and then got mad when people made use of provisions explicitly allowed by the license.
So that’s why he hates Linux lol. What a fucking weirdo.
Like Aether all over again
Remind me please. I just made an analogy, I want to see if it’s the same narcissistic dissonance.
Same dev. Different alias.
lol
It would be saner to drop direct tech support than to drop support for an operating system
Arch users can be the most annoying arrogant and conceited people to exist online.
Ðe maintainers are ðe same. I don’t know if it’s ðe chicken, or ðe egg, but distro maintainers do tend to set ðe tone.
And, yeah, I use Arch everywhere, because so far everyþing else is worse.
Stop trying to make eth or thorn happen. You just make your comments harder to read
For me it is no harder to read, it’s more like people sprinkling in Shakespearean English to their normal speech, it just comes off as either being pretentious, or random xd
deleted by creator
Agreed.
No idea what is going on with your comment, but whatever it is is not English. I typically only block spammers and trolls, but happily you definitely fall into one or the other (or both.)
Issue isnt so much the 12 arch users that actually know what they are doing, but all the fucking posers
You mean “self-entitled”. When you’re “entitled”, you are owed something.
itt: a bunch of entitled Linux youths that don’t understand burnout or QOL.
dude has set a limit to what he wants or is willing to do. still gets called a bitch for defining the line and is still called an asshole.
some of y’all even bring up multiple cases of other foss devs doing/saying the same thing, continue to call them assholes.
🤔 There’s a pattern here…but I’m just too blinded by the brilliancy of my distro to see it…
Notice how the developer argues he forbids packages and how the AIR is in violation of this? But an AUR PKGBUILD is not a package - it’s build instructions. It doesn’t distribute or package anything, you can check it yourself. It’s not called “PKG” for a reason. He misunderstands his own license and believes the allegedly broken PKGBUILD violates it.
He may be right about some users annoying him with bug reports though I’d be surprised if it was that common. It seems like he got a couple of reports, noticed the “forbidden” PKGBUILD and then reacted like this. Just like when changing the license from GPL to CC-BY-NC-ND in order to combat… GPL violations and trademark infringements?
Frankly, the project has not had parricularly stable leadership in a while. Though a bit unfair of a comparison, compare it to Dolphin and you can see a night and day difference in project management.
Ironic that a guy who facilitates large amounts of piracy is complaining about violating license agreements.
If someone wanted to maintain the PKGBUILD for this project, it’d be trivial to include a patch that removes the code he added trying to make it not build.
Or, to make sure to not be in breach of the no-derivatives part of his lisence, just reimplement it and ship with a patch that fixes his “blocker”.
TIL dolphin can emulate psx.
Seriously, this thread is honestly vile and these people are a perfect example as to why this is happening.
How they are this blind to their own toxicity is beyond me
I haven’t read anything VILE here. It’s happening because he’s both controlling and implicitly bad at maintaining said control. Had he not insisted on trying to control packages he would have had a working package like every other software project in the ecosystem that is properly maintained for free by other people’s labor.
it’s honestly why I don’t open source any of my projects.
like, I want to make the world a better place but at the same time it cannot cost me my QOL because some entitled punk thinks they can demand shit from me.
I don’t think you have any projects anyone would use. If you did you could ust tell the imaginary entitled punk you don’t have time.
You don’t have time to tell them all you don’t have time.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
The problem has originated because he changed the license resulting in older versions being the only way to ship duckstation.
Edit: lisence to license
I wonder if he received permission from all the other contributors to change the license of their contributions.
I just cannot wrap my head around an emulator dev who isn’t daily driving Linux…
Damn people are really misunderstanding this comment. Legitimately just don’t know anyone who is involved in FOSS projects who doesn’t primarily use Linux. Not really passing judgement here, just making an observation.
I’m all for jerking around on Windows folks to use Linux in jest and fun, but to purposely shit on a major contributor of any foss for not using Linux makes my blood boil.
honestly, I hope the dev reads this and takes my advice.
as a Linux guy, run dude. fuck these assholes. they don’t deserve your time, your talent, or your efforts. gank your shit, rewrite the license, and block any Linux use. and make sure you call out the distro(s) responsible. sometimes assholes have to be put in their place to learn anything. even then, if history tells us anything they’re just going to go poison some other poor dev and forget about you.
The original code was GPL which he illegally re-licensed to creative commons.
fair enough, but that doesn’t mean he has to do everything anyone asks him. he’s still within his rights to close the source down and obliterate it from the internet. others will come and pick up the torch.
And likewise, that doesn’t mean people aren’t allowed to give him shit for doing it.
If you are the copyright owner you can relicense any way you want learn some copyright law.
right but unless you sign a contributor licensing agreement when you contribute then the copyright owner can’t relicense code you contributed.
so if you contribute to a GPL codebase it’s pretty legally perilous to try to unilaterally relicense code that isn’t “yours”.
this is pretty nebulous territory anyways, but I’d argue it’s pretty unethical to relicense to a more restrictive license essentially “taking” the GPL code from contributors
This is true, but it’s also true that the older gpl versions can’t be revoked.
Well yes and no you can release them going forward under a new licence. If you obtained your copy under the old license you can use it under the old license when you obtain a new copy you have a new license agreement. Thats absolutly possible to do. Revoking licenses is alot harder though and changing the lizens from a foss on to another is often confusing and business inapropiate. However it is legal.
Assuming newer versions are derived from code that was licensed GPL in the old version, the newer versions (which include new code) are also licensed GPL, whether the person writing the new code likes it or not.
yes you can!
…for new versions. not for already released ones.
at least not with most common copyleft/open source licenses.
edit: assuming a solo project. see below.
Only if you are the sole contributor or get a written consent from all contributors. GPL doesn’t hand over the copyright to the maintainer.
Dolphin is the poster child example of changing licences properly. It was a painful job just getting in touch with all the long inactive devs.
yes, correct, assuming a solo project!
thank you for the correction.
Well yes and no you can release them going forward under a new licence. If you obtained your copy under the old license you can use it under the old license when you obtain a new copy you have a new license agreement. Thats absolutly possible to do.
Revoking licenses is alot harder though and changing the lizens from a foss on to another is often confusing and business inapropiate. However it is legal.
Edit: A license is for not vopyright owners not the copyright holder. The copyright holder can basically do whatever they want.
yes and no:
the copyright owner can do whatever they want, but they can’t really revoke a GPL license. that’s not really a thing.
and the part about
If you obtained your copy under the old license you can use it under the old license when you obtain a new copy you have a new license agreement.
seems to me like you are implying that “use under the old license” means “run the program on my own machine”, but that’s not true, since GPL explicitly allows redistribution and modification.
under a GPL license, you effectively give up control over your software voluntarily:
The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software.
(highlighted the relevant portion for your convenience)
this makes revoking the license effectively impossible.
you could continue development under a different license, but that gets legally tricky very quickly.
for example: all the code previously under GPL, stays under GPL. so if someone where to modify those parts of the code and redistribute it as a patch, you couldn’t legally do anything about that.
which seems to be what the OOP claims the change to a CC-BY-NC-ND forbids, apparently misunderstanding, that this new license only applies to code added to the repo since the license change, not the code from before the license change.
You’ll find the copyright owner is Sony.
So the original code wasnt gpl at all then. If this was true i would be pretty sure this repo would already be closed.
Not really sure how you read my comment as “shitting” on anyone. I’m just commenting that it’s unexpected and unusual for a FOSS dev to not be Linux user. Idc what they do, just making the observation as someone involved in the FOSS space that most of my peers are more likely to shit on windows than Linux.
you didn’t make an observation. you made a statement. you stated that it’s impossible to fathom why anyone doing foss would continue using Windows over Linux.
it’s not impossible, you just choose to disregard their personal preferences.
“It’s impossible” is often used not to literally describe a logically impossible event but instead as an exaggeration. “I can’t possibly fathom why” is also not literal, it means under regular circumstances.
I cannot imagine why anyone would prefer grass that cuts your skin over regular grassmeans for typical people using grass in typical garden/field situations. That could be someone’s person preference but that it’s not typical, it’s unexpected.
Just open source it and leave it to the Linux community.
I understand not wanting to support something you don’t use yourself.
He chooses to do direct support over discord vs making people make github issues and wants to whine that this is taxing
I’m passing judgement. He’s a weirdo
People just expect open source devs that do this shit in their free time with absolutely no compensation to bend over for them and do everything they please. The good thing about open source development is that you can just help with the development yourself.
deleted by creator
You know, you don’t need to censor yourself on here. I don’t think anybody’s going to be offended if you just write “shit” or “asshole”.
I thought they said ahunter2.
I understand. Thanks a lot for the info.
I’d go further, you should help with the development. Seems like some people would rather spend hours hounding a developer to implement their thing, rather than figuring out how to do it themselves…
deleted by creator
OK I didn’t know that, stupid move on his part then… What do you mean by likely illegally?
Not a license expert but he changed the license to a more restricted one but did not ask contributors which the previous license may have required.
Except the Duckstation developer changed the license to where they don’t accept contributions from others, so we couldn’t help even if we wanted to.
youths
y’all
Reddit
Defending a dick head dev they know nothing about or their history and insulting end users under false assumption. Overly self righteous.
Yep, reddit as fuck.
You might want to look up the meaning of the word “entitled”.
G*mers are entitled pieces of shit.
Linux users are arrogant hipster assholes.
It’s a perfect storm for creating just the worst people ever. And that’s before we add the weird belittlement open source devs get.
While users can be demanding, this reads like a very immature response. Going out of your way to block support and prohibit packaging, which you can let others do with 0 seconds of your time, is kinda rude.
Author may have been harassed for all I know, but this is still an emotional response. They could have just said “yeah I’m not supporting this at all, figure it out yourselves if you want to” rather than actively blocking Linux functionality/packaging, which is what this sounds like.
deleted by creator
Just because it’s open source
It’s not open source. The maintainer relicensed the project from GPL to the current source-available license last year.
The AUR package uses the last GPL release before the change and thus does the current license does not apply.
deleted by creator
Seems like just repackaging it would solve the problem a lot easier than alienating a userbase- even if small
deleted by creator
The overwhelming majority of Linux users are on 4 distros + derivatives. Debian Fedora Arch Suse not “thousands”
Where would what end? Most actually open source projects just publish releases to source and provide as much or as little support as they feel like. Slap a github issues page up and tell every user that you are only interested in dealing with bugs in the most recent version in whatever official channel you prefer eg provide appimage of releases and insist that users reproduce and document bug.
Time wasted mostly wont even bother to create a github account and if they do close issues if they can’t follow directions.
deleted by creator
Plus you can just make a flatpak or appimage and be done with it since those are distro agnostic. Wouldn’t be the first software where the flatpak is the only supported version and the AUR isn’t; see OBS
It should end at the dev putting out some sort of communication stating they’re not responsible for packaging, and to reach out to the package maintainers with issues installing from a package and not from the officially documented/supported installation procedure. That isn’t out of the norm at all for the open source community, and is one of the main reasons for releasing source code - to enable other people to build it and try to get it to work in whatever environment they want to.
That shouldn’t require a change to a much more restrictive license, and it certainly shouldn’t require implementing changes to your code that force it to fail on specific OSes (like what was recently added for Arch).
deleted by creator
No, the duckstation dev obtained the consent of contributors and/or rewrote all GPL code.
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. I do not have, nor want a CLA, because I do not agree with taking away contributor’s copyright.
So this is more like source available rather than open source…
deleted by creator
Open but not free.
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s necessarily open for all uses. His license explicitly denied using his code in packages. People did it anyway.
There exists pkgbuilds for arch and previously packages of the older GPL builds.
A pkgbuild is just a recipe for each users computer do do the stuff needed to fetch and or build publicly available software. It is copyright the writer of the recipe not the owner of the software thus fetched. That is to say the owner of foobar can’t copyright the functional equivalent of a bash script which does git clone and make install foobar.
The older versions thereof are still available under the GPL and aren’t subject to being removed.
Neither of these are actually subject to the authors whims. He doesn’t own the pkgbuild and if he chooses to offer the file to users they can download it either by manually git cloning it or having a script do it.
So no they didn’t “do it anyway”
He explicitly states that it is not 0% of his time due to being bombarded with support requests.
Are you volunteering to field the support requests?
What I’m saying is that a more reasonable stance is to say “package as-is or fork it if you want I will put 0 effort to accomodate”.
Others have clarified that they are not as extreme as I thought though so maybe that’s fine.
I just think that from a perspective this seems like a “people in X country keep writing gay fanfic about my book and asking if A and B characters are gay. so I’m gonna stop selling there and also destroy All copies left in their language. Because I’m a petty man-child”.
But, once again, I hope this is not what’s actually happening here and my reading was off.
You cannot fork the current project because it is not open source anymore. A fork of the last available GPL release would be possible, though.
As an open source developer, I’d love to have had contributors to help package my apps. It was killing me maintaining everything by myself. It sounds like the control issues I had when I first had contributors, where I didn’t want others to touch my babies too much when people actually started writing code.
Honestly as a dev, I just don’t give a fuck. Is that a licence? MIT is close enough.
I let people pr and if it breaks something, oh well. It’s not attached to my real name anyway. A good ci/cd saves time and mental energy so I don’t have to publish and test. If I bother.
There’s some things like onionos that I’ve helped out with thst I actually take pride in. But it’s all for fun. Why not, it’s my time. Code will come and go, but I left things a tiny bit better for all y’all.
You may appreciate the Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License, though more alternatives are usually recommended.
this developer is a big prick. i had an issue (that turned out to be user error after getting help from another source) with the android version of duckstation so went to their discord for support. instead of offering any aid or insight, i was immediately stereotyped as “an android user” and told “we don’t offer tech support for android” basically for no other reason than “because android users bitch too much and then give you a bad review,” which is just kind of insane imo? there’s no downside to bad reviews like you’re not going to get delisted? anyways, completely not surprised to hear this from that ass. it genuinely seems like this guy hates developing duckstation at all and i am confused why he bothers. give it up man, sounds like you’ll be happier
Can you help me underatand where you proved him wrong?
Who said he was wrong? He basically guaranteed that android users will respond that way by refusing to support them, thus ensuring he will always be right about them
He’s not obligated to provide that support. But the tone sure makes it seem expected.
He’s not obligated to provide support but there are infinitely many ways for decline providing support without insulting someone for being an Android user, and insulting Android users in general, at the same time, literally the moment when someone sought for support.
Especially when Discord is not even inherently a support platform to begin with, Discord is a fricking instant massaging platform, this is fundamentally no different from insulting a stranger on the street the moment they started a conversation, with the most BS insult ever.
Too many FOSS users are toxicly entitled… It ruins things for everyone.
It isn’t toxic* entitlement to seek tech support on the platform the developer offers tech support on.
Edit: added “toxic” for clarification
No, but carrying the grudge this long and vocally leaves me to wonder if the story is as crisp as put forth.
And FOSS die hards put many people off of lemmy early on.
Seek? Yes. Expect? No.
Why wouldn’t I be entitled to tech support if they’re offering tech support?
deleted by creator
It’s more than just FOSS users. It’s “The Internet” in general. At least two of the modding scenes I’ve been in have had multiple developers (and artists and translators) just quit due to their users aggressively complaining about the stuff they give away for free.
Of course, it doesn’t get that much better when people have to pay for things – ask customer service representatives how much toxicity they see from unsatisfied customers.
What are they entitled to? And how is it toxic?
Entitled to nothing. Toxic by acting like they are entitled and now a slew of other people are toxic about a FOSS dev.
But we sure do love FOSS, am I rite?
It’s like introspection or game theory mean nothing to people…
And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.
I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.
The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.
No, but the app will inevitably have bad reviews on Android because it will not be as good - both technically and in terms of “customer service”.
FOSS can’t usually compete with big tech in this area and it is one of the biggest drawbacks to FOSS in general. You are on your own.
Sounds like someone who uses Windows and is annoyed that anyone else uses anything other than Windows.
I dunno about anyone else, but that’s a giant red flag for me when it comes to software devs
Eh, I use Linux and am annoyed at issues from users on other systems. I don’t know Windows dev very well, so fixing issues on Windows is a pain for me. Likewise for macOS.
So I get it.
That said, the proper way to handle this is to make it explicit what platforms are supported and which are not, accept fixes for unsupported platforms that don’t break supported platforms, close issues related to packaging and whatnot on other platforms, and leave open and ignore issues for unsupported platforms. Let the community support what they want, and focus on what you want.
instead of offering any aid or insight, i was immediately stereotyped as “an android user” and told “we don’t offer tech support for android” basically for no other reason than “because android users bitch too much and then give you a bad review,”
This sounds like there were several users berating you, not (just) the developer?
It’s a tricky one. You can’t ban every user from your Discord just for being condescending.
The developer also had a massive drama with RetroArch because, wait for it… “RetroArch users complain too much!” so that’s actually a common sentiment coming from them and it’s absolutely not restricted to Linux. He hates Linux users, Android users, RetroArch users… at this point I wonder why even publish this as a public user facing project at all, he clearly hates users.
In his defense, a LOT of emulator maintainers have this sentiment about RetroArch, so I can’t fault him too much for that one in particular.
I do get the sense this is more common with emulators in general.
In his defense, a LOT of emulator maintainers have this sentiment about RetroArch, so I can’t fault him too much for that one in particular.
Then release your emulator as a paid app for iOS with a closed source and go nuts. Otherwise it’s like going out naked during a rainy day and shouting you’re getting wet.
Agreed really, but less about the RetroArch part and more just in general with the way this person in particular is. In my mind, if you’re not ready to be able to turn the project over to the community to maintain instead of yourself because you’re as much of a controlling prick as this guy, then you should never make it even source-available and should just keep it private source.
What is the problem with retroarch ? Am curious.
I’ve seen multiple emulator devs frustrated with how demanding the project itself is, but moreso toxic behavior from the lead developer towards emulator devs and users alike. Can’t handle any kind of even constructive criticism worth a damn and when people understandably are frustrated by him lashing out he then turns it back around to say they’re out to get him.
Ha thank you for your informations. Much apreciated.
it genuinely seems like this guy hates developing duckstation at all.
I don’t think you get it. He probably enjoys creating, and achieving something awesome. He has no obligation to deal with entitled users of what he gives away
Then he really shouldn’t have a discord server where he offers tech support.
It’s one thing to not give anyone lemonade, you’re never obligated to do that for no reason, however it’s another thing to set up a free lemonade stand and tell whoever tries to get lemonade that they’re annoying and to go away.
If he only wants to create something and not deal with any user issues, he could just do that. Going out of his way to tell users to fuck off is extra work he could just not do and everyone would be happier
You mean “self-entitled”. “Entitled” means that you actually are owed something. It’s like the difference between righteous and self-righteous.
Merriam Webster seems to agree with me.
Sounds like hes just tired of dealing with idiots.
Which I can sympathise with.
Who forces him to respond to such messages on Discord? He can just not engage with people of whom he thinks are idiots.
If he doesn’t want to engage with users at all, maybe not set up a Discord in the first place.
I mean, he’s not wrong, plenty of pre-release games allow you to download before it’s out, then android users go and give it 1 star because the servers aren’t open yet.
I see a few top level comments agreeing with the sentiment that users are being entitled or abusive, but what are they actually referring to? The linked image certainly has no evidence of such behavior. Someone who claims to be the developer filed a deletion request for the duckstation-git AUR package on the AUR and they say:
Every time, it turns into abuse towards me, as you can also see in the comments for the package.
I read through a few pages of the comments here and they’re mostly people talking about fixing issues with the package, and what to do about the dev purposely breaking the build… I only found a single message that could be called abuse:
@eugene, not really but i suspect it’s an uphill battle, check the commit message: https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/commit/30df16cc767297c544e1311a3de4d10da30fe00c
FWIW, I’m moving to pcsx-redux, I rather run a little bit less advanced PSX emulator than software by this upstream asshat. Regardless, much thanks for maintaining the AUR package so far.
And even this is not a good example of what stenzek is describing. For one, it’s obviously a reaction to stenzek’s hostile changes and not the sort of user coming for support and being abusive that stenzek is talking about. The user is also explicitly moving to a different emulator and not expecting any change from duckstation.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Linux pros: FOSS, free, private, secure, etc.
Linux cons: Linux users
Users are, in general, the worst part of making any user focused product.
This job would be great if it wasnt for the fucking customers.
Users are the cons of everything, including Windows and OSX
I’d argue that Microsoft is worse than its users
Idk I’ve met some pretty frustrating administrators who understandably hate Microsoft but they then go and refuse to learn anything else, refuse to use anything other than some variant of Windows for anything that needs an operating system then complain when their hacks to make windows do stuff it was never designed to do (or stuff it once was designed to do but hasn’t been supported since Server 2003) get broken.
As an administrator part of your job is to identify the right tool for the job. I am most comfortable in Linux, I find the general architecture to make far more sense than Windows. I fully recognize that for most businesses Windows is the best bet on many cases. But there are also situations where windows should be your last possible choice. These admins setting up IIS Server and windows-based SCSI targets, using HyperV instead of a better hypervisor for more than a handful of VMs, they frustrate me to no end and I have to suspect they just have given up on learning anything new with these choices
deleted by creator
Sometimes devs are the most difficult users.
“Why is this not working the way it should? Ok, yes I did rewrite how the code manages save data in the filesystem, but that shouldn’t have any impact, I just thought it should make sure it only writes in 8k chunks because I read a comment somewhere that says it would increase ssd life by 3%, but I promise you it’s exactly equivalent to the original code and the problem must be elsewhere, not my patch. I patched dozens of other packages without issue with my 8k barrier strategy without any problems”
Devs come up with wild ideas, rewrite stuff, fail to mention it until you run into it, then explain why it doesn’t matter and stubbornly refuse to at least try without their weird change.
The answer for this guy and other people stretched by supporting Linux is to say it’s flatpak or nothing. Stop trying to build for each dist because it’s not sustainable. If someone on a dist wants to maintain a package then let them take the heat if it is broken.
I don’t think you quite understand how this works. No distro ever asks third party programmers to create packages for them—that’s the job of the distro’s own team, or of enthusiasts using the distro. All the distro packagers want or need from the original programmer is the source code and enough documentation to get it to compile. They take it from there.
Did you read the text? This guy was providing a package because the default one was broken and he’s fed up of dealing with complaints. And the solution to that is just flatpak the thing and tell users to use that regardless of dist.
I don’t think we can count the AUR repository as the “default package” because:
- AUR is a community driven project, for users, by users. Repos are not maintained by the Arch team.
- Arch user needs to explicitely get out of their way to access and use AUR, it is not enabled by default
- AUR repos are not even packages (usually). They are build-instructions. There are specific -bin repos that provide packaged binaries, but that was not the case here, because the emulators license doesn’t allow that.
The issue here was that stenzek moved the emulator to a source-available license, which does not allow Arch to provide packages in their package repo. So people were using build instructions to build the emulator from source. And when that caused issues because something broke, people came to stenzek for support instead of the person maintaining the build instrucions.
And that’s the real fail. AUR users need to understand how things work, AUR packages are community maintained and supported. If the build fails, complain to the AUR maintainer, and they will raise the necessary bug reports to the upstream project if the bug is w/ the project instead of the build instructions.
Providing a package, if he did so, was his choice. No one at the distro asked him to (some users may have, but that has nothing to do with the distro or its other users). If you provide the package of your own volition, you should expect that there will be complaints if it doesn’t work as expected. You need a procedure (and a certain amount of saved-up mental fortitude) to deal with them.
If someone complains to you about someone else’s buggered-up packaging job, the correct thing to do is have a prewritten reply set up saying, “Nothing to do with me, complain to the other guy.” Then close the bugs as WONTFIX and get on with your life. And see if the package host has a removal policy for broken packages, if it is genuinely broken and not just clueless users messing up.
To me, this specific case seems like the dev wasn’t prepared for what the open Internet is like, couldn’t handle it, and imploded messily. Are the users that got on his nerves at fault? Yes, on one level, but their existence was also entirely predictable. If you know what you’re doing, you factor the existence of these people in when you decide whether you’re willing to release your software to the public or not and what communication channels you should leave open.
If someone on a dist wants to maintain a package then let them take the heat if it is broken.
That’s quite literally what happened and why this guy is moaning though. Nobody asked him for an Arch build, people distribute it themselves on the AUR and he’s annoyed anyway.
Why should he get a say on how someone else installs the software on their own systems?
If I want to build an arch package instead, what business is that of his?
I use the Duckstation flatpak funny enough
I think this should have been anticipated after the license change.
Yeah. That’s a pretty shitty license to move to for endusers and others. Disallowing derivatives, etc. is within their rights but, really a dick move but, considering this commit message, not surprising.
It’s actually not within their rights (I am NOT a lawyer)
GPL code is still owned by the person who wrote it, that includes contributors who have made a PR. Unless they all signed CLAs (Contributor License Agreements) to hand over their copyright to the repository owner, the repository owner does not hold copyright for this code, and as such can’t legally change the license. They can use and distribute it as specified in the license terms of the GPL, but that excludes changing the license.
That’s true, but only contributors have standing to do something about it. Unless there are contributors with contributions that are not easily patched out that are willing to make a case out of it, we’re stuck with the last GPL version.
There’s a GPL compliance lawsuit where they’re suing NOT as a copyright holder of contrubtor’s code but as a user of the software (a 3rd party beneficiary, under contract law). The GPL was intended to give standing to users of the software, so hopeful this makes presidence.
Yes, but this suit about a different matter (access to source code) which is a user right in the license. It’s the whole point of the GPL. In this suit the users (ie. The buyers of the devices that have received the binary distribution) obviously have standing.
The problem with relicensing is that the “authors” of a creative work (remember, this is copyright law) are changing the terms of the distribution, and the authors are allowed to do that. The issue at hand is whether the person doing the changing of the terms is allowed to make this change on behalf of “the authors”.
The users may be impacted by this decision, but they are not a part of the decision making process. Hence, no standing.
What you need in a relicensing is someone that asserts (co-) authorship of the work. That’s a much taller order.
Exactly. It isn’t clear if duckstations author really has permission from all contributors or rewrote those contributions he didn’t have rights to change the license on. If he didn’t then technically even the latest version is still GPL but it’s fairly murky and I doubt shy sane person wants to fork it and have all that drama.
I remember the maintainer claiming they had permission from all contributors to change the license but I can’t find a link to it now.
It was if I remember right, just not by the dev
Dev here who also happens to support Linux, and while Linux has its own challenges (whoever came up with the libevdev API, should not allowed to come up with any other API’s), I think it’s good to support Linux natively regardless. GNOME devs however should stop forcing their UX ideas onto others sometimes even outside of Linux. One of them when I was asking about how to I make the Alt key on Windows to stop it trying to open the nonexistent menu bar, then they told me to “just add one”. I’m developing games, not just desktop apps, where the alt key isn’t expected to open a menu bar. I then got told that it’s “expected behavior” (Hungarian here, I’d like to expect that both alt keys are for accessing a second set of gliphs, and one of them isn’t a dedicated “menu key”), and that games like Unreal Tournament “did it already” (that one used the escape key for menus).
GNOME devs however should stop forcing their UX ideas onto others
And then break them with every major release
deleted by creator
I used to have this view but I’ve come around: change can be painful but it’s also necessary. It’s like a wildfire: it’s destructive but it allows for new growth and it’s a sign of a healthy, sustainable ecosystem. Suppressing change isn’t healthy.
Do I think that every change from Gnome is a winner? Nope but I do think they’re doing their best to move in the right direction, as they see it. And for that, I’ll keep using Gnome and I wish them good luck.
Agreed. I use GNOME on one system and KDE on another, and I think it’s good to have a group that’s very opinionated since consistent systems are much easier to support and more intuitive for new users. I don’t think GNOME itself is ideal, but I do think the ideas they’re pushing are worth discussing.
That said, there’s a reason I’m not all-in on GNOME.
Interesting. The only thing i knew is: the escape key is really important for Unreal Tournament.
The original Unreal Tournament (or UT’99, or whatever) is also one of the very few modern-ish full screen games that had a drop down menu bar like you’d expect on a typical Windows application. The other one I can think of off the top of my head is ZSNES, although in that case they rolled their own solution. Not least of which because the original ZSNES was a DOS program (with huge chunks of it written in x86 assembly!) so they kind of didn’t have a choice.
If I remember right UT’99 actually did use Windows style accelerator keys in its menus, i.e. hold down Alt and press a letter to perform an action, which might just make all this malarkey peripherally relevant.
One of them when I was asking about how to I make the Alt key on Windows to stop it trying to open the nonexistent menu bar, then they told me to “just add one”.
FYI - if you haven’t figured this out already (and useful info for other Win32 devs), simply block WM_SYSCOMMAND in your WndProc of your app if the pressed key is SC_KEYMENU.
I’ve done this for a game mod I’m developing (it didn’t have windowed mode originally) and I specifically blocked it only during active gameplay. Otherwise (e.g. during menus) it can be pretty useful to keep active.
Just fork it lol
This is the dev that changed the license a while back from GPL to CC-BY-NC-ND because they got mad about forks.
The kicker here is that the AUR package they’re whining about here is based on the last GPL version.
changed the license … from GPL to CC-BY-NC-ND
oof. Good luck with that in FOSS world.
I can sympathize with being frustrated but that’s silly
So couldn’t someone just fork from the version on AUR?
It doesn’t matter what he does, because any project on GitHub can be forked, and it’s in their TOS.
By creating a project there, he agreed to that TOS, so he can’t disallow forks, simple as that.
Yeah im sure someone will fork and it will be named chickensation or whatever. Then we will move on.
Hope the developer feels better. Its easy to get burnt out on passion projects. If I were to guess, this is what is happening. They are going to say some pretty insane things in the next couple of weeks and then get a handle on their life.
Ive always liked: epsxe myself. Works well and no real drama. Its a very old console.
Yeah im sure someone will fork and it will be named chickensation or whatever. Then we will move on.
Ha! Yeah ok. And looks like its maintained.
Ha! Yeah ok. And looks like its maintained.
It is but it’s also just a libretro plugin without any stand-alone GUI. That said, with the great strides projects like ES-DE brought in terms of usability atop of standard components make stand-alone GUIs more and more unnecessary.
Would have to go back to before the license change in September 2024. The current license basically forbids forks, from my reading.
You can’t fork it or redistribute it… but you can distribute patches for users to apply, and those are easy to add in a PKGBUILD. That’s how a lot of game/ROM patches are distributed and they appear to be legal.
It’s an emulator, lets be real, the majority of the users couldn’t give a shit about license terms anyway.
It’s also a PS1 emulator. A console that’s been emulated for over 20 years now.
Getting flashbacks to installing qmail back in the day…
I have a heard time imagining it to be worth it with other psx emulators readily available without weird hoops to go through.
Yeah… But then it sucks for anyone not running Arch (btw) or derivative distros. I really don’t have a dog in this merge conflict but really would feel bad for any packager maintainers.
but really would feel bad for any packager maintainers.
It’s already unpackageable because of the license anyway.
The only “legit” way to get the emulator is their provided AppImage bundle, and nothing else. The author also has a rant about Flatpak being broken and unreliable and refusing to support that, so…
I have some issues with flatpak, myself, but that mainly stems from having trouble finding documentation to clear up how to properly use extensions and non-standard dependencies that are easy to do with OCI images.
Ex. I had a really hard time trying to get Vega Strike built as a flatpak.
If it’s only available via appimage, as the reply to this comment states, then it will still run just fine on Arch.
Yeah… That’s pretty terrible. I was meaning packaging patchsets for other distros. Hopefully the GPL-preserving fork is better.
Why is it terrible? Appimages are fine.
Appinages are fine. Needing to apply changes as patchsets rather than just building normally sucks. Especially in deb and rpm distros.
You cannot forbid forking a public GitHub repository, per their terms of service
Yes. The license doesn’t technically appear to forbid forking, just sharing the fork.
So how would that work? I know we say emulators are allowed…but Nintendo came knocking a while ago, Github removed the repos pretty quick. If they go and applies their fork-less license in a court of law…that would have very nasty consequences for them.
the big thing that caused nintendo to take action against the switch emulators was that the creators were taking money for it, and explicitly pirating games. like, they set up a patreon where you could pay for early access to builds specifically tailored to games that were not released yet.
Theres a LOT of emulators that got caught in all that not just the ones that were taken down for legal reasons. Theres a reason quite a few new emulators are not on Github/public git sites anymore.
Im not saying your wrong, what I am saying is that the situation is a bit nuanced and if a PSX emulator wants to push their “rights” they might find they actually dont have any when push comes to shove.
yeah they came down hard after someone crossed the line after looking the other way for like 30 years. i’m not surprised.
also, playstation is like the most legally well-tread area for emulators. remember bleem?
thats a name I haven’t heard in years! Oh wow blast from the past.
Yeah, but the Bleem! case set the precedent for all emulators of all consoles. The ruling doesn’t just apply to PS1.
Bleem! was able to charge for their product as long as it didn’t include the system BIOS. They reverse engineered the emulator itself, so without BIOS or ROMS, no IP is being stolen.
Which has become the standard operating procedure regarding emulators for decades now.
Please. Stenzek is smart but unhinged.
Fortunately, it looks like that was done already with Swanstation, which also has many more contributors.
I hate TwinAphex’s guts so I won’t use Retroarch/Libretro.
I got mednafen standalone for PS1.
Is TwinAphex still involved in Libretro? Can’t seem to find evidence of them from the last few years.
Daniel still has the RetroArch trademark registered in his personal name and continues to oversee the project and that’s enough for me that he’s still in a mangerial role, but you’re right in that the last shitty thing I heard about him is fucking up netplay in 2022.
Valid points but the maintainer comes off as deranged.
If I give something for free, it’s my rules. Simple as that. Don’t like it? don’t accept it.
Linus is often a dick. He even acknowledges it. Don’t like it? Well, there are other OS.
I’m not like that, I like being helpful, I actually do many volunteer hours a week, but… I do hate entitlement. I don’t see these people giving Microsoft as hard a time.
Lets keep the Karen constrained, please.
Yeah but you also don’t get to be upset if someone calls you unpleasant. Both things can be true.
He’s upset because people are bothering him for packages that are out of his control. A similar thing happened recently with OBS where a distro was packaging it in a non-standard way, iirc.
If you don’t want to see your software packaged in ways outside of your control, is it smart to publish it with a license that allows it to be packaged in ways outside of your control?
Nah man I maintain a few decently sized packages on github and refusing support etc is perfectly normal but generally you don’t go on this toxic rant and just say “nah man I can’t afford to maintain this” which is very well accepted.
deleted by creator
No, Maintainer comes off as pissed off for dealing with a lot of headaches created by others creating a version he doesnt support, and doesnt want, yet is dealing with all the backlash and headache of.
and to try to stem the tide, he created a package just for those people… and they refuse to use it, continuing to use the broken version, and bombarding him with headaches over something that he, again, does not control.
Only liars would say they wouldnt be pissed off dealing with such a situation.
While I understand and respect his feeling, in my limited experience, people that don’t like when distributions package their software are often deranged.
Still, if you are using OS packages, your first stop should be OS fora / bug trackers, not upstream. Whoever is producing the distro/OS packages should engage with upstream if and when that’s necessary. Upstream, especially small upstreams, really shouldn’t be expected to deal with the craziness of Nix, Arch, Debian, and SteamOS all at the same time.
Users are, IME, mostly annoying. Sometimes (not often) I’m glad none of my software has any. At least at work I can point at the Teams / Slack / Jira conversation to prove they specifically asked for something completely different last week and I implemented that.
Normal people would just invite distribution packagers to develop fixes upstream.
Refuse to build in Arch package environments. My license does not allow for packages
but it’s not a package. On arch it downloads the source from his own git and it compiles it on the end user machine. He is a dev and doesn’t know that? Or just pretending?
AUR is just (automated) instructions on how to compile (except -bin, in that case it’s packaged)
A previous commit of the readme even said:
Linux users are encouraged to build from source when possible
yes, good luck building from source without documentation on what libraries do you need
He is a dev and doesn’t know that?
I think it’s reasonable that he doesn’t. He doesn’t use Arch (or any Linux flavor), so isn’t aware of how packaging for Arch works. I’m guessing someone submitted the PKGBUILD and he just accepted it, and now people come to him for support instead of the person who submitted it.
I 100% agree w/ removing the PKGBUILD, but he doesn’t need to go out of his way to remove Linux support. Just state that the project doesn’t officially support Linux, but is open to Linux-specific bug fixes. Then if anyone complains about a distro-specific issue, close the issue and move on. If someone opens what seems to be a legitimate bug w/ Linux, leave it open and move on.
That’s really all the community should expect here.
They know. The PKGBUILD they provided is exactly the kind of thing that’s in the AUR. The dev’s PKGBUILD wasn’t in the AUR because they didn’t want it to be — instead hoping arch users would go to the repository and use their maintained one. Arch users continued to try to use AUR instead, leading to the dev’s frustration.
I don’t expect this will help anything. If the AUR maintainer is active, they will probably just patch that restriction out.
Their right to do so, but the comment sounds like a whiny bitch.
Imagine if Linux developers building the libraries this was built on where as petty.
Dude has a history of acting bipolar.
