As much as I like Duckstation as an emulator:
Good for him. When the response to trying to protect the project and reduce harassment is… harassment and outlets insisting that they are shitting all over open source and continuing the false narrative that code was stolen? Fuck 'em. They don’t deserve the emulator and we don’t deserve it for letting them be the minimally opposed voices.
If you are not a copyright holder, then you are not in a position to make any demands. I find it especially ironic, considering when the GPL was actually violated on multiple occasions, even as recently as a few months ago, nobody ever takes issue with that.
Ironic that he says he understands licensing but doesn’t understand that, if you’re not a copyright holder, you don’t have standing to do anything about those violations. The Violations of GNU Licenses page states that if you see a violation, you should confirm the violation, collect as many details as you can, and then:
Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holders of the packages that are being wrongly distributed. The GNU licenses are copyright licenses; free licenses in general are based on copyright. In most countries only the copyright holders are legally empowered to act against violations.
I remember reading about someone attempting to challenge that by suing for the rights that should have been conveyed to them by the infringer respecting copyright, but I wasn’t able to find anything on it. I did find references to people who were partial copyright holders being found to not have standing due to not having sufficient ownership to make a claim, though - see the outcome of https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html
And that’t the crux of the issue. Stenzek doesn’t actually understand the reality of licensing.
The reality is this - you can’t do anything without a lawyer. Laweyrs cost money (pro bono isn’t a thing in the copyright world AFAIK, but IANAL).
If he wanted to avoid this, then maybe he should’ve kept it closed source from the beginning. Chinese sellers on AliExpress couldn’t care less about licensing anyway, so that way he’d have at least some protection.
IMO his course of action so far has been wrong.
What he should’ve done is this:
- Cause a stir
- Get support from the community
- Open up donations for the project (or just himself, since you don’t want a repeat of Yuzu)
He could even go after Arcade1up legally if he raised funds, but that’s not even worth the time if you ask me.
100% agreed. Nobody’s going to care about someone stealing his source code if they don’t know about it.
I’m fully out of the loop on what’s going on, but I really hope the emulator doesn’t shut down, I love my PS1 emulation…
Wasn’t he the same developer that decided to abandon AetherSX2 and released an update that nerfed the app?
Even if he shuts down the emulator, the code is out there forever. Can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. Was this guy born yesterday?
What do you mean? This analogy doesn’t make sense for whats happening here.
He’s trying to avoid crap like SwanStation
Even if he shuts down the emulator, the code is out there forever. He will be playing whackamole with forks and various other projects just like Nintendo does. The analogy absolutely works for what’s happening.
What’s the problem with SwanStation? Forks are perfectly okay and normal with the GPL, that’s the fucking point of the GPL.
That’s exactly why they’re changing the license. The problem with Swanstation are the developers. Retroarch in general has some pretty horrible people maintaining it and this isn’t the first time they’ve harassed an emulator dev over nothing.
And “it is already out there so they can’t take it away”:
swanstation is already a few versions back feature wise? But, regardless, it will rapidly become outdated as new “tech” is added to emulation and issues are found with third party libraries or code. Good software needs good support and just having a ten year old hash is almost always worse than useless.
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