Because older versions of Duckstation were GPL licensed, those will be forked and continue on without Steznek's input, though it does increase the risk of the project thus stagnating and generally ending up stuck.
Duckstation was already compatible with something like 99.99% of PSX games, almost all of the recent commits were localization/UI changes, the core functionality was already polished to the point of imperceptibility. Forking it from a previous version would not remove any appreciable functionality, and there's very little work that needs to be done to the code beyond adding even more languages to the menus, and perhaps ensuring an OS update doesn't somehow break functionality, but this can be solved in the modern day by giving duckstation its own happy little flatpak type container.
Exactly. They could have changed the license to AGPL and companies wouldn't touch the project with a ten-foot pole. And those who simply ignore the license? Why should they adhere to the new one? Instead, now people who stream emulated video games on TH-cam/Twitch and have some, ANY sort of channel monetization enabled now can't use it any more because that's a commercial use. Bravo!
@@qwesx this project probably isn't going to allow that, but in other cases - you can *always* try to acquire a license by reaching out to the developer. The only limitations are when there's no single copyright holder. But assuming that he wasn't against commercial use (he is) you could ask him for a special license, perhaps for money or for credit or for just personal commercial use.
@@qwesx I mean, the dev would have to prove the uploader was using a version of DuckStation from after the licence swap before he has a valid claim. Also, I might be wrong about this, but I believe TH-cam has the option for a copyright claimant to enable ads on a video where their copyrighted material is being used. If that's the case, the licence can get breached without the original uploader's consent. What a mess.
What irks me is the clause of no forks , if the source is already out there , it can technically be forked ; but i think the maintainer would rather just burn everything down ,rather than let the open source community continue if the maintainer is no longer interested in the project - sad...
@@breadmoth6443 You don't need to break the new terms. The changes that happened since the old license was removed are probably minimal, so it doesn't even matter. You can simply fork the code from before the license change and you're good.
Its a shame Stenzek left PCSX2 3 months ago, I loved his contributions for the Vulkan backend and the new UI which desperately needed an upgrade since forever
Stenzek is like Kanye West on a low scale; both are talented of their own known field but they have a very poor attitude and behavior towards others when known far enough
Oh, the dev removed all references to PCSX2 (as he took a lot of code from it), all copyright and so on. The simplest word to describe him right now is "shameless"
he did mention he rewrote a lot of code, but neither you or me care enough to check the commit history further than what you said in your comment, right?
@@generallyunimportant Fuck I Mean, as someone who uses both, that is the flimsiest excuse. What, you take the GPL code and literal UI, then make it shareware because you 'changed it'? Uhm, source branch needed? Because maybe I want to fork the work PCSX2 did before you touched it just to go clean slate?? I am not taking your word for it! Give me the date and I will fork it myself! (Probably not I am lazy and I am making my own game but still, that should demonstrate the level of 'out of your way' you have to both believe/accept his words at face value)
If I'm not wrong, he made both the UI and Vulcan renderer in both Duck station *and* PCSX2. Not defending him, he's had these spats for a few years, just, bringing this up.
@@twenty-fifth420 i really should've highlighted the "i don't care enough to verify his statements" part of the comment huh or maybe it's misunderstood because it sounds ironic(/making fun of? idfk) if you read it more than for two seconds? oh well.
It's like being a chef and cooking for free for a homeless shelter in your spare time, and then realizing your food is being sold at restaurants and other people get the profits instead of yourself. The recoil is kinda understandable. For some reason there's an expectation for devs to work for free that doesn't exist for other careers
Sort of like creating your software for free (a gift to the world) and then finding out Microsoft has made a billion dollars selling your software. I guess you should send him some lube as a gift?
And disallowing forks is like nuking your house because there are rats in it. Sure it works, but you also destroy a lot of other things, most of which didn't hurt you directly. I can understand the Non-Commercial, sure, but really not the ND (in principle, ofc irl any fork would just remove the commercial again, and the devs get shafted anyhow, but i think redis's license is a good starting point to change that. It shouldn't have received the amount of backlash it got)
@@4crafters597 no, it's like disallowing people from selling the food you make for free. It's excercising a form of control over how your work is used for it to be worth for you to make that work. If you're working for the emotional benefit of feeding the poor, you'd want to ensure that the food can't be sold for you to get your "payment" in the form of emotional satisfaction. He doesn't prevent anyone from using his emulator, doesn't make it close source. So he isn't nuking anything and doesn't hurt people
If the code was distributed under a FOSS license, then yes, the old version can be readily modified, republished and so on. The authors can additionally publish it under whatever license they wish and stop distributing it under that one, nobody can take those rights away from the authors, but vice versa they cant take any rights they granted others away, either. Simple.
It's a real shame this happened for the reasons that it did. Without some kind of nonprofit organization that offers to deploy an army of lawyers to be any small-time developer's attack dogs, the GPL is virtually unenforceable, leading to companies regularly treating it as a free buffet. Then again, if he's only ever had run-ins with companies that are openly violating the GPL, how it changing to a different license supposed to solve that? The code's not any less visible and stealable than it's ever been.
Yeah, that is the weird part. It is no less "stealable" and given his past actions, nothing will happen to future violators of CC BY-NC-ND. In fact, he might have made it easier to violate the terms and win in court since CC isn't written for software and even they recommend not using it for that purpose.
Dev: *does not want code to be stolen for cash* Also Dev: *does everything in his power to make it so only those who are stealing it for cash are going to be the ones using it* Another case of "people with the technical skill to make a thing don't always know about how stuff outside the program work".
It's not some kind of companies, it was libretro continuing to be a bad actor in the FOSS space, and it's not the first time they've done something like this. They basically forked Duckstation then tried to make the issues with the core upstream's problem while taking in donation money which is supposed to go towards fixing the issues in the fork. What should have happened is libretro should have found an issue in their core, fixed it themselves, then checked if it existed upstream/made a PR or created an issue about it rather than just finding bugs then immediately trying to force upstream to fix it. It's akin to a petulant child complaining.
This is not a move you can make, if you make this move any fork or version downloaded under the GPL is GPL. So any of those forks can now be the main project, the devs can move over and the original deserves to die.
@@Poldovico But he is not allowed to change the license of the previous version committed version of Duckstation from GPLv3. What he did is legal and doesn't break the license, *if* he rewrote all of the code that did not comply with his new license. Previous version releases can still be freely forked, and he cannot stop you from using those versions or modifying them and making your own projects. As long as someone is willing to become deeply familiar with the duckstation codebase and then fork it, Stenzek can run off with his proprietary version and sit in a corner while everyone else uses DuckStation2 or whatever the FOSS community rebrands it as.
@@trustytrojan There aren't many people right now, sure. But you can't say there won't be any in the future, either. This is one of many cycles to come and pass by. Let this project rest and another one take over. PS1 emulation is mostly a solved problem anyway, so if you ask me, everyone could use a little break before trying to improve it again.
@@RogueRen how is it shareware?.. It's freeware by the *ware definition. Open source freeware. Freeware projects are often freeware only for non-commercial usage, which is how they (hope) to pay for themselves. If you're a commercial company making money using a freeware product, you fund its development for regular users.
@@softwarelivre2389 Dude don't walk that route. Try to get Stenzek perspective on this. He poured thousands of hours on duckstation and the rewrite of PCSX2, and over the years he got harassed and screw over multiple times for what? Giving out an immense and very high end piece of work for free.
Granted there aren’t many options for non-commercial non-derivative licenses. It’s a weird combination to come across in the world of source available software.
I think people not stroking his... ego enough plays a huge role in moving to a license that gives him basically absolute control and anyone else none at all
This could violate the Qt license agreement. If the user hasn't paid for the Qt Commercial License, they can only use Qt under the GPL or LGPL licenses for free. If the user wants to switch to a (Qt's) Commercial License, they must pay for it
You can just use QT under LGPL. LGPL allows commercial use. Go ask them about it and you get a lot of funny ambiguity and nonsense. The GPL and LGPL explicitly protect a user from additional licemse requirements. IANAL but I can read and that's what those licenses say.
@@infinitelink The LGPL is more permissive when it comes to compatibility with other licenses, particularly proprietary and commercial ones. This means it's easier to use LGPL-licensed code in applications with different licenses, including proprietary software. In the case of Qt, if you use the free version, your project must comply with either the GPL or LGPL, depending on the version you choose. If you wish to license your project under something other than GPL or LGPL, you'll need to purchase a commercial Qt license. so the question is again if the Duckstation dev did purchased the license to make the re-licence possible, if not he has to keep it under GPL or LGPL as under Qt terms
@@AlexanderAhjolinna iirc, the LGPL imposes copyleft on project modifications within the licensed project itself. like a library being used, if you use the library, you can lock the derivative that uses the library, but not if you modify the library itself to form your project. what does the usage of Qt within DuckStation looks like?
@@Wilker_uwu DuckStation isn't modifying Qt itself. If they wrote custom patches to Qt, they'd have to release those, but as long as Qt is dynamically linked they don't have to release any of their code under any particular license.
@@gigaherz_ No Linux release and is also absolutely proprietary. I’m waiting for a DuckStation fork containing the code that was licensed under GPLv3 instead…
@@doingitsidesways yes duckstation is far superior , and i think epsxe might be abandoned , sad that another project instead of being abandoned still manages to die off because the maintainer probably has a stick up their a--- and wants to go proprietary for some reason.
@@alicevioleta3184 meh just read the documentation or use one of its many gui like mednaffe. Easiest option would be to use the retroarch core but I hate the menus in retroarch
Sorry, no. I really like the enhancements Duckstation provides and the GUI is very easy to navigate. If I were to go anywhere it'd probably be to the Beetle libretro core or PCSX-Reloaded.
A fan translation project i work on from time to time is tested entirely in Duckstation, however recently we've found that Duckstation ignores some executable alignment shenanigans that mean there's a few bugs that we never knew existed
@@xan1242 see all the stuff that had to do with the executable was handled by a different team member (the game stores some text inside the executable for some reason, the names of attacks, characters, dialogue choices and text seen during battle) I was just doing stuff for the main text stored inside the BINS The game also has the half the game "cut out" One half is in english but the localisation is butchered beyond belief And the other half was never translated into English and is just left on the disc with a couple flags set to stop you accessing it My job was just to fix up the English text and make it fit with the rest of the series, someone else on the team rushed shit and broke tons of stuff
Just so you know that is pretty typical even in something like Dolphin. That's a failure on your team members part (an easy mistake to make if new to asm). Emulators purposely don't check alignment because of the performance cost to do so. Thankfully its very easy to fix your codes, just ensure any memory access is 4 byte aligned.
Duckstation has the audacity to go propriety and yet his codebase are riddle with others work including Mednafen sections. he was a selfish jerk now he still is giving opensource emulation a bad name
I'm just glad the conversation is happening. (even if I had to be the one to start it for Nix.) I only played a hand full of psx games in my day, so this particular emulator is only a "I care about all emulation" focus, but I also know if I ever want to play Monster Rancher again, this is gonna be key to keep running.
The emulator is technically ready, what was being done recently were things like translations. These licenses, for small software, are of little use. If someone violates, who is going to spend money on justice to appeal?
A) copyright claims in the US allow recovery of attorney's fees for the winner B) There are non-profits that exists explicitly to defend and enforce open source licenses So possibly yes, provided whoever's violating the license has deep enough pockets to be collectible. There's a reason companies roll over so quick when they realize they dun goofed.
@FireStormOOO_ you still need enough money to pay the lawyers through the suit, and if they have deep enough pockets to cover your legal fees they can afford to stall the case until you can't afford to continue. No business big enough to sue has to win in court, they can just make you settle it privately or bankrupt you. In fact, they do it on both sides. Sony couldn't win their copyright lawsuit against the first Playstation emulator Bleem, so they just kept dragging them back to court and dragging their feet through trial again and again until Bleem's developers were nearly bankrupt and then bought them out solely to shut them down. Copyrights, licenses, and patents are a deeply corrupted system.
@@myria2834 You're talking about a completely unrelated thing than OP or I were talking about. I was talking about an open source author protecting *their own code* from being infringed by a company. There *are* resources that do that and enforce the GPL. You're talking about the *other* thing authors of emulators need to worry about. Which yes, nothing you said is wrong, just off topic.
I really don’t want to have to use SwanStation, I hate everything that RetroArch stands for in compartmentalization of emulation into a huge, confusing single spaghetti program that’s obtuse and (For me) rarely works, I live and die by single program emulators.
nixpkgs actually had an existential crisis about their potential mass GPL violations when this happened, lmao But yeah the "no packaging" clause sucks specifically for distros like NixOS, which depend on their own packaging to run applications at all
@@mayredwood "existential crisis" is a strong way to put this. Nixpkgs is much better at handling licenses than the AUR, for example. And the supposed legal issues in this case are purely theoretical (in the sense that they haven't actually been put to the test in the court of law and nobody actually knows if repackaging is considered modification and if dynamic linking is derivative work or mere aggregation). So Nixpkgs aren't really breaking the GPL any more than most other distros.
Depending on their own packaging used to be the main reason I don't use NixOS. If I wanted that kind of relationship with my OS developers, I'd use Apple.
What is offensive to the developer about forks? Because they stand on the shoulders of work he did? Is it about credit? Doesn't the GPL require credit be given? If someone were to read his code, which is still available, and then do a complete "rewrite" is he going to pursue legal action because it's not cleanroom? The ONLY thing that I could understand is if he wants a cut of licensing, but he says he doesn't want it to used for profit. But why then, if the code is still out there for free use?
At least from this video it sounds like he just doesn't want people making money off his work for some reason or another. Probably feels like he is being taken advantage of. He puts all this work in to essentially carry this project almost solo and then someone takes his work, contributes nothing, and makes money that should be his but isn't because he wanted to give to the community, not profit. Probably feels like the community around his emulator is being completely ungrateful in wanting to fork this and essentially kick him out of his own project and he would rather burn it down than let ingrates take his work and completely ignore his wishes. This is pure speculation and is just me trying to wrap my head around this situation though. While he is completely wrong, I can't deny that I would probably be at least a little frustrated if someone else was profiting off my work when I elected not to profit off of it myself.
@@Drazil100 Perhaps he should have read the provisions of the GPL which allow commercial redistribution and sale of the program, so long as the distributor/seller distributes the source code as well. What Arcade1Up did was a breach of the GPL, but they did rectify it and distribute their modified source code once they were called out on it as a GPL violation. If he was so uncomfortable with commercial redistribution of his code, he should have licensed it under a more restrictive license from the start.
@@orangejuche Let me be 100% clear here I am NOT defending the guy. Hey 100% broke his own license. I am only trying to understand what caused him to break his license rather than just straight up calling him a butthole and moving on. Something triggered him to do this and maybe there is a lesson in here or something that would make this less likely to happen. This guy is not the first FOSS developer to destroy their own project because they are tired of the community. Usually it happens because some project becomes a super necessary piece of software holding up a bunch of modern applications that have no clue the project is even a dependency. Large scale businesses end up relying on this software but nobody cares to even donate to allow the sole developer to justify maintaining the project and at some point they snap and nuke the project. What he did is completely unacceptable. I do NOT support him handling the situation the way he did... But there is a good chance his reason for doing so, while not an actual excuse, is better than we give him credit for.
Which is ironic because his project explicitly depends on several of his own forks of other FOSS projects to which he's gone out of his way to break API.
@ALinuxEnthusiastone of the problems is retroarch forking the code and removing all copyright notices from the source code. That should not be allowed under gpl and it is just shamelessly stealing the work of a smaller dev by a bigger organization. Maybe now he’ll have more resources to fight that.
@@Afaik777 Did RetroArch do that? I was under the impression there has been some sort of drama regarding RetroArch, even outside of DuckStation, but I haven't been able to find many resources with a clear explanation.
Shame, shame. I like DuckStation, I think it's the best PS1 emulator, even though I haven't used it much lately because I'm focusing on PSP games right now, but this is really a shame.
if he doesn't, it would seem then the dev is just a prick and would rather break the toys instead of letting an open version of duckstation to live on .
@@softwarelivre2389 thats just it about the authoer's own words - if he is too busy, why not just let someone else fork it or something? i don't understand the author's reasoning.
@@breadmoth6443 he doesn't need to allow anything. Anyone has the right to fork the code, as it is GPLv3. He is not allowed to release any proprietary version.
You don't have the right to deny someone from doing that. " All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. " so they can't prevent it. Anyone forking the GPL version is allowed to do so and has a legal right to do so.
Because you can't retroactively revoke the GPL. Anyone with the previous build can use its original license, spread it, and then you tend to loose your community to a fork. Its a terrible idea as a dev.
thats because when you do that, and your project is like... relevant... people will fork the older version if enough people care about your project, and you don't allow contributing to your own project, the fork will most likely win.... ~~if not enough people care about your project, the existing and potential people will most likely be scared off by your new license and just stop using your project~~ (this is wrong)
I know not of the drama that caused this license change, but a project I worked on would have been affected by it and was only possible because Duckstation existed as a high-quality PS1 emulator to which I could make and distribute modifications. Back in 2022, I worked with the Final Fantasy VII speedrunning community to construct a manipulation to be able to control the outcome of one minigame (chocobo racing) to greatly speed up and increase the consistency of clearing that segment of a 100% speedrun. To do this, I needed to be able to accurately simulate millions of races with different starting RNG conditions and in-race inputs. This was only feasible to do because I could construct a hack into Duckstation to automatically run these simulations rapidly and record the results, then leave multiple instances of the emulator running for what ended up being several months of computation time. I could only complete this project because Duckstation existed and let me share modified builds to those willing to run computation time for this project, and its results were and continue to be extremely successful and helpful for the speedrunning community.
@@mstech-gamingandmore1827 It is an interesting environment, Sodium vs Embeddium. TLDR, the Sodium devs have made the switch suddenly without a clear or reasonable explanation, and they have been doing a lot of finger pointing at the forks including Embeddium over some... interesting interpretations about how things are running.
@@ColonelGerdauf From what I understood of their explanation: They really need money. Sodium is a fabric mod. They tried porting it to forge but Lex (the forge founder) was really rude and kicked them out of the server. Most people use forge. It was a matter of time before ports were made for forge. These ports got way more downloads. Sodium devs are upset because despite taking comparatively smaller effort, ports of their hard work got way more attention. Demotivated by this and desperate for money, they switched licenses and will only contribute to the new license from now on. There will be a NeoForge port of Sodium (as will there be for Embeddium). I will leave you to form your own opinions on this information.
@@mstech-gamingandmore1827 It doesn't help Sodium that... what they were USED to fix is now no longer a vanilla issue (yeah, Mojang fixed the rendering and lighting engine for 1.20.x). (This is according to the devs who retired Starlight (a rival renderer to Sodium) after they did benchmark tests that measured the new rendering engine as only benefiting from a renderer mod for a matter of 4 NANOSECONDS less than vanilla, as opposed to entire seconds before the vanilla rendering engine was a thing. Nowadays unless you're stuck on a Sandy Bridge graphics chip (aka, in 1.16.5 jail) or in a modlist that isn't updated for 1.20.x, Sodium introduces more problems than it solves (and Starlight solves the issues Sodium does without getting all over the code and breaking compatibility with a bunch of custom model mods). Also IIRC, Sodium breaks Optifine so anything that uses Optifine (or Optifabric) had to be recoded to work with Optifine (this is what Iridium and Embeddium do, IIRC, it's not just a matter of "Sodium was unofficially ported", it's also a matter of "Forge users use Optifine custom model mods a lot and Sodium breaks that, and since Optifine is closed-source Sodium would have to be rewritten to cater to Optifine"). Source: spent way too damn long finding the Goldilocks zone of engine tweaking on Fabric because I had a low-end 2014 Sandy Bridge refurb laptop as my only PC until 2022, and I really wanted custom entity model and custom item model mods and was diligent in combing through the repository issues with Sodium and found out that... yeah Sodium breaks way too much stuff.
The author was going nuts and hostile to community for a while, so it's no surprise. Unfortunately, he's also heavily involved with pcsx2 and some of his code in melonDS too (the part that supposed to ease up wayland support but instead breaks it). This is especially ironic because he loves making hard dependencies on his forked versions of other people's projects with completely obliterated API.
I think that his decision is fine, retroarch shouldn't be making bank outta dev works and asking for donations on patreon to make their ecosystem alive. If we have to give money to people it's for the hackers who make the emulators and not some kind of org who steals code and then goes away with it.
@@BrodieRobertson People on Twitter argue is it a violation of the license by just compiling the code: you get a remix/derivative of the code after the process :)
This is irrelevant, but i'm imagining now if Linus was like "nah, NO ONE can use Linux anymore!!! >:U" and then activated a hidden backdoor that nuked everyones Linux kernels and bricked their machines.
I do care about emulation being FOSS, but in the end, I am an end-user and just care if there is an emulator that just works without hastle. I do think emulation of current gen hardware is sketchy and probably not very good (piracy, license holders cough cough Nintendo, getting involved), but any old generation console emulation, I am all for. I prefer FOSS as I believe that's better for the emulation space, but I can't in good conscious say I care the most about that.
Here's the fun part: no emulator can enforce copyright. The moment it goes to court, Nintendo's lawyers lock on to a new target. We'll see new forks appear within a few weeks, and there's nothing they can do. Emulation belongs to the community, not to an individual
What is the fuss, just fork a version before his change of license and go from there. The version before the license change is still GPL. He has no rights whatsoever to against you doing that on that specific version.
People obsessively developing unique niche projects for free are often similarly obsessive about other things. It's not practical or reasonable to give away your effort like that, if he could easily step back and look at what he's doing, he would've moved on years ago If he wasn't insufferable, you wouldn't have had any of his projects, and the state of PS and PS2 emulation would've been completely different
@@NJ-wb1cz Not PS1. There were already good PS1 emus before DuckStation. ePSXe might be old, but still serviceable, and there's PCSX-redux, which is still maintained. I'm not aware Stenzek is part of that one (I might be wrong though), as to my knowledge, both PCSX and PCSX2 were started by Linuzappz. Also, CMIIW, but isn't Mednafen's PS1 emu their own? As in, not using any third party emus (I know they use VBA for GBA emu).
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 he's by far the primary contributor to PCSX2, and pcsx-redux is on the order of magintude less popular than duckstation. It`s kinda like saying, we don't need linux, we have freebsd. Maybe you don't, but without linux the state of unix-like operating systems would've been profoundly different. Maybe it would've been better, maybe worse, but definitely different
I've interacted with him a total of one time. He is an insufferable asshole. Ares as an emulator is creating their own PS1 emulator, and I'm excited to see how it proceeds going forward.
I mean, the reason that's even the case is because a lot of very stupid people happen to use the software he works on. A major example of that is that he left PCSX2 (and I can't confirm this, only he knows the reason why) partly because he backported the audio code from DuckStation to PCSX2. This had the side effect of removing a feature called Async Mix: basically, it makes audio voices (in the audio engine sense of the word, not actual "voices") play at real-time speed, regardless of the current speed of emulation. This had the side-effect of breaking some games that rely on accurate audio timing (like rhythm games, but non-music games could also be affected). The removal resulted in users, who were using Async Mix because their potato 2006 craptop couldn't run games at full speed, getting mad at the devs, since now the audio will only play to match emulation speed - hence, the audio now plays in slow-mo for them. They would make the excuse that "the game was running FINE before" (when actually, it was running in slow motion: they just didn't realise it because the "normal" audio was kinda tricking their brains.) I'm assuming Stenzek got threats because of that (far from the first time something like this has happened in emulation) and just quit the project. He even had a PR in the works, but it was closed because he deleted his PCSX2 fork outright, basically signalling a halt to any further involvement in the project. A new contributor moved this code into a new PR of their own, well within the bounds of the license, but it was shot down for personal reasons: Stenzek said he didn't want any of his code being reused (I'm too stupid to fully understand license stuff, but given PCSX2 is GPL 3.0, and Stenzek is considered the copyright holder of his own code, I _believe_ this is enforceable(?)) IANAL.
You can already feel the difference, real updates have slowed down to a crawl again, it's mostly controller database and translations... just like it was before Stenzek.
One of the games I like to play from the psx era is Breath of Fire 4 (was my 1st memory of the series, haven't gotten round to trying the 1st 3) so yes I do like to use psx emulators. However I was never a fan of Duckstation, don't remember what my issue with it was but I've only ever had a worse experience with it than good ol' epsxe.
i don't really get what is meant to do. Since you can just fork the last version of Duckstation under GPL and continue the work and the guy said he was done working on the project as the main contributor him abandoning the project would do the same thing he is currently doing. one of the core things about GPL is you can use continue using the things published under GPL even if what it is attached to goes closed. so making duckstation close source when you don't mean to continue working on it would do nothing.
I emulate...a lot. While I'm happy most of it is freely available, I have no problem with commercialisation. I've paid for a license for reDream and bought a gold license for PPSSPP to give back to the developers cos those are awesome emulators. Duckstation is on that same level of quality, if Stenzek wanted to charge $5-10 one-off for "pro" licenses, maybe put the upscaling and widescreen hacks etc. as premium features, I'd be fine with that. And if it allowed him to leave his fulltime job and do that fulltime instead, all the better.
You should be find. The only time that happened was with Xenia Canary from my knowledge. It's not out of the land of possibilities. A lot of people who make these emulators, mods, ports, fan games, etc. are nuts. Minecraft and the Sonic community have plenty crazy stories when it comes to their mods, fan games, and 3rd party tools. Edit: Maybe not a lot, but those few can be loud.
Just don't update anymore, I haven't updated duck station in a while anyway, nothing stays free forever, I knew that from the start when duck station showed up on the scene
Don't update man. He is not in the right in the head. Stenzek has previously added adware and trackers in his app out of spite as Talhreth. He has some mental issues.
Changing code license is not anything new to emulator authors. MAME did had a previous license that forbide any commercial usage, but they changed it when some tech museums started to use MAME and were being attacked by some people due to the licensing issue, so devs changed it from propietary to open source licensing, which in return, allowed unauthorized (but legal) commercial usage. The problem is people that uses work from others to make money themselves. This is stealing. The entire purpose of the relicensing is to prevent that, and in case of anyone trying to use the relicensed software in a commercial product can be actually sued, rather than just watch how others profit from your work and hobby. Of course, this particular case of relicensing is having the colateral damage that other means of redistribution and packaging are becoming illegal for the relicensed code. If the author is happy with it, then so be it. Forking the older code and maintain it will be better for GAMERS, but i don't think it will be better for "emulation" in general, since usually nobody with the knowledge will be able to filter what is proper emulation and documentation and what is just a hack. (see what happened with yuzu and citra emulators). Also, emulation coders usually tend to be quite prone to rage. Yeah, they have the knowledge and skills, but they also are the direct targets for anything wrong that can happen with emulators. not a glamorous life at all, considering the actual world economy.
You are wrong there is no stealing. GPL is based on the concept today I give something to the community. Tomorrow I will hopefully get something I desire back from the community. In this case they can't make money from the use of Duckstation because a rival Company can do the same. All that really is selling is the Hardware and work they did themselves. Is the price ok? I doubt it, but we have a free economy to correct that.
@@michaelklingenstein2626 Wrong. The GPL is based on the concept that the code is the money: I give you the code, i ask for all changes you made to give them back in the open. You can do anything with it (including selling) as long as you give the code back. That's why Linus Torvalds accepted the code from Tivo back then, even when the code cannot be used in any practical event (The hardware was locked to use only the signed firmware) and the same reason linux devs reject changing the license to GPLv3, and insteas, they do still use GPLv2. In Duckstation case, some seller used it to sell their hardware, without opening the code and did changes to the code without giving it back, violating the license, and earning money commiting copyright violation. Now you have several options, including sue the offender (this cost money) or change the license for another far more restrictive. In Duckstation case, developers just choose restricting even distribution of the code/binaries. Is in their right to do so, like it or not. In MAME case it was the same, but some developers did really sue in private and always the cases were settled, resulting in the opening on the code by force. Not everybody has the money to do that, and even less, when is all about a hobby. Of course the older code/binaries are available and some other code could continue the work, but i doubt this is going to happen. Just look the Citra/Yuzu case.
It gives you massively more rights thatn if you just found a code without any license. The most important one is that you can actually use the software.
@@honza970 No. You do not need the license to use a creative work if you just find it without one. At least in the US. Most software tries to turn that on its head by guarding any use or even access to it behind an acceptance of an EULA. But it is necessary for them precisely because without any such contract you could just use it without restrictions. This is also why media companies go after users of torrents, but not after users of piracy streaming sites. Copyright - as the name implies - is about making _copies_ and derivative works. In the free software world people often say that code without a license is proprietary and useless. And it is absolutely useless _to distributions_ because they cannot package and _distribute_ it at all.
It is similar to the BS that they pulled with Grayjay. They are effectively proprietary. Being able to see the source doesn't mean it is not proprietary. With enough money and signatures on contracts, you can get all sorts of closed-source code.
It still gives ultimate legal control to the copyright holder. The only difference to a proprietary license is that it happens to include a public license, specifically the most restricted one. At least it's an emulator, not a text editor, otherwise this license would be worse than any proprietary license.
It's interesting to see the reaction because I'm feeling a similar sense about my project. The plan was to get a lot of inputs and commits, but in the end it has been done 99.99% by me, effectively removing any incentive to keep the project open source. I'm not sure what exactly happened or if it was always like that, but nowadays I see many open source projects being solo. Also seeing some license shifts, such as MIT -> AGPL, Apache -> CC BY NC 4.0 etc. Perhaps there's a natural equilibrium of which projects have the scale to get contributions and which projects are bound to change.
theres also no reason to make the project _no longer_ open source, you might still get contributions and if you lose interest and abandon it people can carry it on.
@@a.lollipop I'm intrigued, I've seen this idea repeated almost word for word so many times that it seems like there's a source. Is there a particular person, like Louis Rossmann, who has popularized this particular wording?
@@a.lollipop so here's my input on the logic: this makes a lot of sense for irreplaceable technology, like medical device software, legacy file formats, firmware for a DVD player, a classic game. In contrast there are the edge technologies, like JavaScript utilities, command line tools, blender plugins and project templates. The difference is that without a hard anchor, it's unlikely somebody will deal with the pain of developing this software. Instead new software will replace it, especially if the license halts further development. As for contributions, the latest one I saw was an user who said there was an installation error (without details) and that he probably won't try to install again. To me that's basically a customer. And if I change the license, it does not affect the development since I'm the developer. Having license A or B will never fundamentally influence my work. The main question lies - if I abandon the project, what happens then. Assuming we're not wishing an untimely passing, I'm still able to change the license at any time. So if I decide this project is finished, I can open source it again. Or someone can find it and request a license change, those happen too (like CC to MIT). Or someone can approach me or my estate about a better licensing deal. I believe blender is a good example of why proprietary license is never the end. Finally, let's cover the economical effects - who is losing what. If the license just restricts development, then users are not losing, only derivative product users and competitor developers. However, if nobody else was commiting code, the competition is near 0, at least the open source competition. Therefore, the "open source" dogma does not apply as much when there's no visible community participation. Conversely, when there is a lot of competition, it makes sense to make any projects more open source, sort of like React becoming an open source project despite being an in house investment. Furthermore, supporting open source or closed source developers should not be a barrier. There are plenty of microscopic projects that cost little but bring a lot. So to address the elephant in the room - whatever the license is, most developers will still be able to do better with money than without. And so if a project was 0$, maybe it just means that it now costs 10$ if it's publicly licensed as Non-commercial. So for these reasons, whenever I hear about "abandoned projects or community" I contrast it to the current situation - who will pick it up? Who is abandoning it? Side note: I have seen Japan be a lot more fluid about it's sharing licenses. What's often seen is - free for end users, but not for corporations. And no redistribution. Meaning that it's free but you have to encounter the author. These models are interesting because open source is transforming these days, for example - Terraform and ElasticSearch.
@@a.lollipop >"no, it's just logical." and that's how you know someone never programmed and open-sourced a popular thing before. As someone who created a website that had over 500k conversions (for the main feature specifically, not counting the other features of the site) and had it open-source, the only other pull requests ever submitted was all from dependabot. The majority of projects will never get outside contributions except on very rare occasions. Thanks to my experience with my own public open-source projects and the actions and reactions from all the self entitled open source software users for any decision you make (aka 90% of them), I realized that it's better to just create a private repo and invite those you trust to help you with/those who'll respect your license and your choices.
3.35 I like the fact Stenzek thinks he's being attacked. People like that make me laugh. It makes me think of how many people instantly think someone it just trying to cause trouble when all they are doing is informing and/or trying to help. Listen Stenzek if you are just gonna be a child and threaten to ceace development, go ahead. There are many others wqho are willing to take your place.
I think Stenzek want to avoid duckstation codes stolen and monetized like damonps2 because some of the codes between duckstation and pcsx2 are similar. Yes, stenzek wrote the programming codes for both duckstation and pcsx2
What is it with certain modders amd emulator developers, having huge and fragile egos? They're playing with operating systems and content that technically isn't even theirs in the first place. Emulation should be free anyways. Charging money for premium features is kinda shady, but what is happening to Duckstation, the dev is a huge tool.
I think it's because it's an extremely deep technical subject that makes you feel like an archwizard for being able to understand it when many others cannot.
Considering he pushing non-commetial licence, its more to protect from being used commertially since GPL makes it impractical with just software redistribution, but don't prevent that if its included or used in commertial products. You need to put in there soues and there finacial situations where you working on project for free for others to use it for free, but someone making lot of money out of your work more then you do and it always sits in back of there head when they paying bills. Making someting FOSS requires guts and confidence, thats why lot of big FOSS projects are company backed, that can earn money out of what they making in alternative ways
oh no, now all those thousands of people pretending to have legitimate copies of every single playstation game ever released in all regions will now be forced to violate a licence agreement!
It seems to me that the AGPL would have met his goals without the drama. Any license can be violated and can only truly be enforced via courts, especially CC licenses which are not meant for software. The last GPL version should be forked but not by someone into drama. It should be someone who has a passion for the project, is actually going to work on it, can play well with others, and is capable of writing useful software. You don't need someone to fork it for you!
Stenzek is the same guy who made the AetherSX2 PS2 emulator for Android. That's the emulator that he pulled and then put ads on because he couldn't ignore random idiot end users. He is not mentally sound
Duckstation is definitely not open-source any more, but at least people can fork the last open version. I use emulators a lot, but have never used duckstation... because it's not a retroarch core. And if a decent retroarch core exists, there's no point using anything else. So for psx I've been primarily on libretro-pcsx-rearmed.
Yeah some chad from a different country will fork it and streznek will just cope and seethe because he can't do anything about it. Serves the crybaby right.
While I don't agree with the decision to change the licence, I can understand the reasons for doing so. They have put a huge amount of work into the project and it's an incredible accomplishment. I don't think it's fair to hold any ill will for the dev or the project, since they do own the rights to their code, just as any contributors have the rights of their contributions. Not wanting to implement a CLA is quite commendable.
AUR did nothing bc technically AUR is not repackaging. The user ir. Since AUR is just a bunch of automation scripts you can technically alledge that they arent distributing anything, they use the same reason to give scripts to proprietary software that couldnt be redistributed otherwise. Im not a lawyer basic disclaimer but I dont see that argument being proven in court in this particular case...
This particular scandal made me wonder how much of other open source software one day could make a complete 180 and turn proprietary. I feel bad and almost dont believe in the current open source anymore because now i think that even copyleft licenses like gpl have legal tricks to turn them proprietary without much hassle which means everything i believed was a lie because im not a license expert. I dislike commercialization too so i dont care about that part but the no fork part is sad
any software made mostly by one person can be re-licensed as they own the underlying copyright (will need to re-write the few parts made by others) so anything that isn't made by a large community can easily stop being OSS whenever. as for GPL see Linus Torvald's complaints about the ant-tivosiation clause and how that was introduced as an example of how the licenses themselves can go bad (note: personally I'd like an anti-tivoisation clause if it applies to the use-cases/industries currently exempted).
@@duven60 well you just confirmed that i cant trust any of the foss stuff now because be it one person, a small group of people or a big corporation they can just make it proprietary any day they want. If some of the participants are against it then all they need to do is to bribe these programmers so they "dont mind" anymore or just rewrite their parts of code if they are stubborn. The only exception is if the project have like thousands of participants and even then its probably possible to deal with it :(
@@Longlius For Linux, only if all developers agree to it it can be changed. For code that belongs to developers that disagree to the change, their code must be removed and depending on the case, rewritten.
Well not really. If something is public domain it means anyone can use it however they like. A large corporation can take it, develop it so that it's much better and release it under a closed source license. Now they effectively control that piece of software, since no person will be able to rewrite in their free time what the paid employees did. They will always be ahead.
Not even close. Copyleft licences are a hack to ensure the public still has access and business/users that distribute or sell must contribute back. As Andrei says, closed applications have no such obligations.
I never use any product with waterfowl in its name. Kind of a personal guideline, but it's served me well. Remember when DuckDuckGo got caught lying about not collecting/selling data? Yeah, I dodged that. I'm still using PCSX-R so this isn't fazing me either.
I'm kinda ok with the change, as many said if someone wants to fork prior to the licence change that's ok, so anyone interested in maintaining can step up and keep the work. Also he can in the future prior to retirement change his mind and open source it again. Many things can happen.
I'm getting deja vu with this situation. Feels like guy is trying poorly replicate something similar to what Byuu/Near did some time ago with bsnes/higan and declaring it free while trying to disavow "unofficial" or commercial forks, but Byuu had much more goodwill built up with the emulation community at the time and IIRC still retained MIT licensing with his emulators even then. Pretty sure Stenzek was around Byuu's forums when that happened, so he probably knows at least on the surface what Byuu went through back then before he ultimately passed, so I would assume as the lead dev of arguably the most accurate (formerly?) open-source PS1 emulator around he would understand what such decisions would mean if he followed through improperly. Something's fishy with the execution of this and likely the overall situation in general.
it depends. Generally, if you contribute some code to my GPL project, you retain the copyright for your contribution, which means I need your permission to relicense. That is because the code I wrote myself is licensed from me to whoever gets it, but the code you contributed is licensed from you to whoever gets it, including me. I am allowed to use your code so long as I obey the license you put on it, which presumably would also be the GPL so everything is fine. If I want to change the license later to something that isn't compatible with the GPL, I can do it as the copyright holder for my own code, but I can't do it for yours. You'd have to either legally transfer ownership of your code to me (as in, sell or gift the copyright) or license your code to me again under a different license that is compatible with my new license. Alternatively, I can rip out all the code that isn't mine, rewrite it myself, and then I can relicense when I'm no longer distributing code that someone else owns. This is a key feature of Free Software/copyleft licenses that distinguishes them from permissive licenses that are "just" open source. If the project were open source but not free software, say under the MIT or the "do whatever the F*** you want public license" (which save for the asterisks is a real license some projects use), then it might be easier. Licenses that allow for use of the code in proprietary software, so if you contributed under MIT, I am allowed to just yoink it and publish it proprietary without asking you or ripping your code out. The final scenario is when a CLA exists: this is a Contributor License Agreement, which basically outlines the terms under which you the contributor provide your code to me the project owner. In that case, I could require that even though the project is GPL, you license your contributions to me in a permissive way, such that I am allowed to relicense, or even that you just give me the copyright altogether, at which point it's my stuff and I can do whatever with it. So long as I only accept contributions from people who agree to the CLA, I am covered. It would appear in the case of DuckStation, there was no CLA, but the owner went around asking everyone, some people said yes, some people said no, he took out the parts contributed by the people who said no, rewrote them, and then published the new version under a corresponding license, with permission from everyone whose code was still in the project.
I've never went deep enough with emulators, so I'm not affected, but this is still very much sad. Makes me a bit hesitant to get my feet wet on this branch of gaming.
well seems to me the author is not interested in preservation ... it is sad also that projects die - i would definitely love to contribute if i know how to code , but also an example of projects stagnating is zsnes - it was the best by far as a SNES emulator, but as far as i know still doesn't have an official 64-bit port , but snes9x does , but zsnes is far superior.
@@breadmoth6443 zsnes was already vastly inferior to other emus because the source code was full of hacks and written in x86 assembly. it was fast but its advantage ended right there.
@@breadmoth6443 "far superior" is not what I hear in the romhacking communities I'm in. they consider zsnes to be one of the very worst emulators, due to poor accuracy. what in particular do you prefer about it?
Shame, i still love Duckstation so much. Its my favorite emulator tbh even though im not a big fan of PS1. Being able to do supersampling, getting rid of wobble graphics and playing games in high resolutions is so awesome. Been playing Megaman Legends 2 and Legend of Dragoon on it and its just an amazing experience.
Considering he did most of the commits on the project and he doesn't want people to profit from his work, find this fair, now for the FOSS heads that get all mad about this, it is what it is. the issue with cores in general does suck massively.
Sad to discover this but glad you posted the video. Duckstation is by far the best emulator I've used to date :(. Very fast, stable, not buggy, etc. If he truly cared about the cause (emulation) - he wouldn't mind people trying to commercialize and profit. This guy seems like a sad, angry micro-managey developer.
Yea, you clearly are not a developer. Companies forking code and profiting off it and contributing nothing back to the source is a problem that harms the emulation scene, and prevents emulators from getting proper recognition and support. There *are* companies that license emulators legally, and those funds help advance the projects.
@@InakaGames I'm (professionally) SWE lol. Why TF else would I be subscribed to Brodie's channel? I will admit I don't work on FOSS so licensing isn't something I worry nor care much about. I agree with your statements (generally). But let me put it this way: If I worked on a SIDE PROJECT that I started with 0% intent of making money on myself & I willingly opened-sourced it... I (personally) would not care if people forked it and profited off it. I guess I'm just a free-giving & libertarian kind of guy 🤷 If Stenzek never wanted people profiting from his work he should've never open-sourced it in the first place. He's basically the sole contributor anyways. The dumb ass is just now regretting open-sourcing it in the first place.
This is unfortunate. It basically makes it that if he were to disappear, no one could continue it. If he went with polyform shield at least that has a clause to allow forking in the case of abandonment of the project
My guess is thats why the chain license changes. like the first change WAS on the GPL list but also had next one on ITS approved list that list then had the CC on ITS list...
Looks like Swanstation is the new PS1 emulator. Some devs are just greedy and don't want to accept that by betraying the community, nobody will trust them any more.
How did he betray "the" community ? WHAT ? He's a skilled programmer who made Duckstation as a hobby, he has the right to do anything he want with it, including making it source-available/proprietary even if people don't like that, also, he owns project, most if not all the parts by other contributors has been rewritten by himself, he owes you NOTHING and I don't see how making it source-available/proprietary is betraying the community it's his project he does whatever he wants with it, I'm myself a emulator programmer and most of my stuff is proprietary, people complain every time about this and tell me I HAVE TO open source my things but I don't want to I write code for my own pleasure and I do not care about what people will say.
Because older versions of Duckstation were GPL licensed, those will be forked and continue on without Steznek's input, though it does increase the risk of the project thus stagnating and generally ending up stuck.
Duckstation was already compatible with something like 99.99% of PSX games, almost all of the recent commits were localization/UI changes, the core functionality was already polished to the point of imperceptibility. Forking it from a previous version would not remove any appreciable functionality, and there's very little work that needs to be done to the code beyond adding even more languages to the menus, and perhaps ensuring an OS update doesn't somehow break functionality, but this can be solved in the modern day by giving duckstation its own happy little flatpak type container.
Given the low interest from other developers in the past, don't expect updates on any forks, which might be fine.
other question is that has the dev bought Qt Commercial License also, if not he can't do this either because Qt free version is GPL/LGPL only
I mean it's emulating PSone games. It's all basically done with only really weird fringe cases needing work.
it has already stagnated before this whole ordeal. all updates were just maintenance updates.
"I am very upset that I have to deal with my licence being violated. I am going to solve this by moving to a stricter licence"
Exactly. They could have changed the license to AGPL and companies wouldn't touch the project with a ten-foot pole. And those who simply ignore the license? Why should they adhere to the new one? Instead, now people who stream emulated video games on TH-cam/Twitch and have some, ANY sort of channel monetization enabled now can't use it any more because that's a commercial use. Bravo!
Basically the Tldr of the video lol
@@qwesx this project probably isn't going to allow that, but in other cases - you can *always* try to acquire a license by reaching out to the developer. The only limitations are when there's no single copyright holder. But assuming that he wasn't against commercial use (he is) you could ask him for a special license, perhaps for money or for credit or for just personal commercial use.
@@qwesx I mean, the dev would have to prove the uploader was using a version of DuckStation from after the licence swap before he has a valid claim.
Also, I might be wrong about this, but I believe TH-cam has the option for a copyright claimant to enable ads on a video where their copyrighted material is being used. If that's the case, the licence can get breached without the original uploader's consent. What a mess.
@@adamk659 That's... literally their job. To stream games.
What irks me is the clause of no forks , if the source is already out there , it can technically be forked ; but i think the maintainer would rather just burn everything down ,rather than let the open source community continue if the maintainer is no longer interested in the project - sad...
In a way it already was.
@@DarkusObscurius lets hope we see a fork soon - unlike nintendo i do not think this author can do jack-sh---t to get the fork taken down imo .
@@breadmoth6443 You don't need to break the new terms. The changes that happened since the old license was removed are probably minimal, so it doesn't even matter. You can simply fork the code from before the license change and you're good.
I think github even says that by uploading stuff to github you automatically allow people to fork it
@@frooastside Forking ≠ modifying. You can fork all you want. You can even distribute the official packages. But you cannot modify anything.
Its a shame Stenzek left PCSX2 3 months ago, I loved his contributions for the Vulkan backend and the new UI which desperately needed an upgrade since forever
he revolutionized ps2 emulation with is involvement in pcsx2, the guy earned the respect he has
Stenzek is like Kanye West on a low scale; both are talented of their own known field but they have a very poor attitude and behavior towards others when known far enough
I guess my age is showing there. When you ask me about PS1 emulation I don't think DuckStation I think ePSXe.
same never even heard of duckstation
YEP. still use it on the occasion i need to emulate playstation titles. otherwise i play on my official hardware via various means
@@alicevioleta3184 ew
Same.
@@alicevioleta3184 ePSXe sucks. DuckStation is better.
Oh, the dev removed all references to PCSX2 (as he took a lot of code from it), all copyright and so on.
The simplest word to describe him right now is "shameless"
BTW, please check the commits: A lot of them are just for deleting copyright or modifying definition names, just to delete pcsx2 references :D
he did mention he rewrote a lot of code, but neither you or me care enough to check the commit history further than what you said in your comment, right?
@@generallyunimportant Fuck I Mean, as someone who uses both, that is the flimsiest excuse. What, you take the GPL code and literal UI, then make it shareware because you 'changed it'?
Uhm, source branch needed? Because maybe I want to fork the work PCSX2 did before you touched it just to go clean slate?? I am not taking your word for it! Give me the date and I will fork it myself! (Probably not I am lazy and I am making my own game but still, that should demonstrate the level of 'out of your way' you have to both believe/accept his words at face value)
If I'm not wrong, he made both the UI and Vulcan renderer in both Duck station *and* PCSX2. Not defending him, he's had these spats for a few years, just, bringing this up.
@@twenty-fifth420 i really should've highlighted the "i don't care enough to verify his statements" part of the comment huh
or maybe it's misunderstood because it sounds ironic(/making fun of? idfk) if you read it more than for two seconds? oh well.
Imagine making open source software and then being mad people used your software openly. Who'd have guessed it? Big surprise.
It's like being a chef and cooking for free for a homeless shelter in your spare time, and then realizing your food is being sold at restaurants and other people get the profits instead of yourself. The recoil is kinda understandable.
For some reason there's an expectation for devs to work for free that doesn't exist for other careers
Sort of like creating your software for free (a gift to the world) and then finding out Microsoft has made a billion dollars selling your software. I guess you should send him some lube as a gift?
And disallowing forks is like nuking your house because there are rats in it. Sure it works, but you also destroy a lot of other things, most of which didn't hurt you directly. I can understand the Non-Commercial, sure, but really not the ND (in principle, ofc irl any fork would just remove the commercial again, and the devs get shafted anyhow, but i think redis's license is a good starting point to change that. It shouldn't have received the amount of backlash it got)
@@4crafters597 no, it's like disallowing people from selling the food you make for free. It's excercising a form of control over how your work is used for it to be worth for you to make that work. If you're working for the emotional benefit of feeding the poor, you'd want to ensure that the food can't be sold for you to get your "payment" in the form of emotional satisfaction.
He doesn't prevent anyone from using his emulator, doesn't make it close source. So he isn't nuking anything and doesn't hurt people
@@NJ-wb1czImagine if RMS & TBL made their works proprietary
Yeah, he ain't cut out for FOSS
On the topic of Swanstation diverging from Duckstation, maybe now might be the best time for it to Rebase with the final Open Source version
It's dead
chad move: just publish your now illegal changes on the torrent site you pirate your ROMs from anyway
If the code was distributed under a FOSS license, then yes, the old version can be readily modified, republished and so on. The authors can additionally publish it under whatever license they wish and stop distributing it under that one, nobody can take those rights away from the authors, but vice versa they cant take any rights they granted others away, either. Simple.
It's a real shame this happened for the reasons that it did. Without some kind of nonprofit organization that offers to deploy an army of lawyers to be any small-time developer's attack dogs, the GPL is virtually unenforceable, leading to companies regularly treating it as a free buffet. Then again, if he's only ever had run-ins with companies that are openly violating the GPL, how it changing to a different license supposed to solve that? The code's not any less visible and stealable than it's ever been.
Yeah, that is the weird part. It is no less "stealable" and given his past actions, nothing will happen to future violators of CC BY-NC-ND. In fact, he might have made it easier to violate the terms and win in court since CC isn't written for software and even they recommend not using it for that purpose.
Dev: *does not want code to be stolen for cash*
Also Dev: *does everything in his power to make it so only those who are stealing it for cash are going to be the ones using it*
Another case of "people with the technical skill to make a thing don't always know about how stuff outside the program work".
@@lpfan4491same applies to PR-people
Just file a DMCA to repository if your code was stolen.
It's not some kind of companies, it was libretro continuing to be a bad actor in the FOSS space, and it's not the first time they've done something like this. They basically forked Duckstation then tried to make the issues with the core upstream's problem while taking in donation money which is supposed to go towards fixing the issues in the fork.
What should have happened is libretro should have found an issue in their core, fixed it themselves, then checked if it existed upstream/made a PR or created an issue about it rather than just finding bugs then immediately trying to force upstream to fix it. It's akin to a petulant child complaining.
This is not a move you can make, if you make this move any fork or version downloaded under the GPL is GPL. So any of those forks can now be the main project, the devs can move over and the original deserves to die.
Except the one guy who changed the license in the first place is 90% of "the devs" on his own.
@@Poldovico But he is not allowed to change the license of the previous version committed version of Duckstation from GPLv3. What he did is legal and doesn't break the license, *if* he rewrote all of the code that did not comply with his new license. Previous version releases can still be freely forked, and he cannot stop you from using those versions or modifying them and making your own projects. As long as someone is willing to become deeply familiar with the duckstation codebase and then fork it, Stenzek can run off with his proprietary version and sit in a corner while everyone else uses DuckStation2 or whatever the FOSS community rebrands it as.
@@orangejuche in theory yes. In practice, when the one dev holding a project up stops doing that, the project dies.
@@orangejuche there arent many people in the world who care enough to maintain a console emulator. project's probably gonna die if he leaves
@@trustytrojan There aren't many people right now, sure.
But you can't say there won't be any in the future, either.
This is one of many cycles to come and pass by. Let this project rest and another one take over.
PS1 emulation is mostly a solved problem anyway, so if you ask me, everyone could use a little break before trying to improve it again.
So Duckstation is basically shareware now
Stenzek chose to be an enemy of FOSS. Then so be it.
Shareware is it's own weird distinction but it's not too far off
@@RogueRen how is it shareware?.. It's freeware by the *ware definition. Open source freeware.
Freeware projects are often freeware only for non-commercial usage, which is how they (hope) to pay for themselves. If you're a commercial company making money using a freeware product, you fund its development for regular users.
@@softwarelivre2389 Dude don't walk that route. Try to get Stenzek perspective on this. He poured thousands of hours on duckstation and the rewrite of PCSX2, and over the years he got harassed and screw over multiple times for what? Giving out an immense and very high end piece of work for free.
@@softwarelivre2389“Enemy of FOSS“? Who talks like that????
Don't think Steznek can blame Retroarch to get out of this one lads.
I find it every weird stenzek would choose a CC license and say he knows what he is doing when CC says their license isn't designed for software.
Granted there aren’t many options for non-commercial non-derivative licenses. It’s a weird combination to come across in the world of source available software.
I think people not stroking his... ego enough plays a huge role in moving to a license that gives him basically absolute control and anyone else none at all
This could violate the Qt license agreement. If the user hasn't paid for the Qt Commercial License, they can only use Qt under the GPL or LGPL licenses for free. If the user wants to switch to a (Qt's) Commercial License, they must pay for it
Underrated comment. Yeah it will
You can just use QT under LGPL.
LGPL allows commercial use.
Go ask them about it and you get a lot of funny ambiguity and nonsense.
The GPL and LGPL explicitly protect a user from additional licemse requirements.
IANAL but I can read and that's what those licenses say.
@@infinitelink
The LGPL is more permissive when it comes to compatibility with other licenses, particularly proprietary and commercial ones. This means it's easier to use LGPL-licensed code in applications with different licenses, including proprietary software.
In the case of Qt, if you use the free version, your project must comply with either the GPL or LGPL, depending on the version you choose. If you wish to license your project under something other than GPL or LGPL, you'll need to purchase a commercial Qt license.
so the question is again if the Duckstation dev did purchased the license to make the re-licence possible, if not he has to keep it under GPL or LGPL as under Qt terms
@@AlexanderAhjolinna iirc, the LGPL imposes copyleft on project modifications within the licensed project itself. like a library being used, if you use the library, you can lock the derivative that uses the library, but not if you modify the library itself to form your project. what does the usage of Qt within DuckStation looks like?
@@Wilker_uwu DuckStation isn't modifying Qt itself. If they wrote custom patches to Qt, they'd have to release those, but as long as Qt is dynamically linked they don't have to release any of their code under any particular license.
"Duckstation is the one emulator you immediately think about"
No. PCSX is the first PS1 emulator i think about.
ePSXe for me. No idea if the project is still going but that's what I used back in the day.
@@gigaherz_ No Linux release and is also absolutely proprietary.
I’m waiting for a DuckStation fork containing the code that was licensed under GPLv3 instead…
both of them suck compared to duckstation sadly.
@@doingitsidesways yes duckstation is far superior , and i think epsxe might be abandoned , sad that another project instead of being abandoned still manages to die off because the maintainer probably has a stick up their a--- and wants to go proprietary for some reason.
Bleem! and VGS here. They were doing the craziest sorcery, working on freaking 133Mhz single-core CPUs.
I could have sworn this happened like 1-2 years ago, I legitimately feel like I just travelled back in time and I've already been through all of this
groundhog day(year?)
or, you know, funny premonition dreams :3
You might be remembering when he archived the project instead
he really doesn't understand what opensource means.
I remember the drama when "retroarch stole his code" (open source code!)
@@generallyunimportantwhy 3 times or wdym: 3
Yet another example why private and commercial users should have different clauses in every license
Mednafen is also a really good ps1 emulator. Doesn’t have much in the way of enhancements but it is very accurate
it's also a pain in the ass to use. i refuse, it's awful.
i'm a linux user but i detest that software it's just horrific
@@alicevioleta3184 meh just read the documentation or use one of its many gui like mednaffe. Easiest option would be to use the retroarch core but I hate the menus in retroarch
Its not user friendly tho
@@alicevioleta3184 you can use a front end for it like mednaffe or use the retroarch cores instead
Sorry, no. I really like the enhancements Duckstation provides and the GUI is very easy to navigate. If I were to go anywhere it'd probably be to the Beetle libretro core or PCSX-Reloaded.
A fan translation project i work on from time to time is tested entirely in Duckstation, however recently we've found that Duckstation ignores some executable alignment shenanigans that mean there's a few bugs that we never knew existed
Got caught by the good ol' 4-byte alignment issue, eh?
I recommend No$PSX for any debugging anyway. And always test on real HW wherever possible!
@@xan1242 see all the stuff that had to do with the executable was handled by a different team member (the game stores some text inside the executable for some reason, the names of attacks, characters, dialogue choices and text seen during battle) I was just doing stuff for the main text stored inside the BINS
The game also has the half the game "cut out"
One half is in english but the localisation is butchered beyond belief
And the other half was never translated into English and is just left on the disc with a couple flags set to stop you accessing it
My job was just to fix up the English text and make it fit with the rest of the series, someone else on the team rushed shit and broke tons of stuff
Just so you know that is pretty typical even in something like Dolphin. That's a failure on your team members part (an easy mistake to make if new to asm). Emulators purposely don't check alignment because of the performance cost to do so. Thankfully its very easy to fix your codes, just ensure any memory access is 4 byte aligned.
You should report these problems, it'll most likely never get fixed if you don't
I think the Policenauts team got bit by the same issue, luckily I think Xenia catches that if you don't have real hardware on hand
Duckstation has the audacity to go propriety and yet his codebase are riddle with others work including Mednafen sections. he was a selfish jerk now he still is giving opensource emulation a bad name
"Rules for thee, not for me"
How is he selfish when it's the other people making money while he makes zero cents? You aspies need to take more pills.
"audacity" nice foreshadowing
Don't care, let me play my fuckin roms in peace without bullshit
@@AkiRalcolf Who is stopping you? Which games you want to play but can't?
I'm just glad the conversation is happening. (even if I had to be the one to start it for Nix.) I only played a hand full of psx games in my day, so this particular emulator is only a "I care about all emulation" focus, but I also know if I ever want to play Monster Rancher again, this is gonna be key to keep running.
The emulator is technically ready, what was being done recently were things like translations. These licenses, for small software, are of little use. If someone violates, who is going to spend money on justice to appeal?
A) copyright claims in the US allow recovery of attorney's fees for the winner
B) There are non-profits that exists explicitly to defend and enforce open source licenses
So possibly yes, provided whoever's violating the license has deep enough pockets to be collectible. There's a reason companies roll over so quick when they realize they dun goofed.
@FireStormOOO_ you still need enough money to pay the lawyers through the suit, and if they have deep enough pockets to cover your legal fees they can afford to stall the case until you can't afford to continue. No business big enough to sue has to win in court, they can just make you settle it privately or bankrupt you. In fact, they do it on both sides.
Sony couldn't win their copyright lawsuit against the first Playstation emulator Bleem, so they just kept dragging them back to court and dragging their feet through trial again and again until Bleem's developers were nearly bankrupt and then bought them out solely to shut them down. Copyrights, licenses, and patents are a deeply corrupted system.
@@myria2834 You're talking about a completely unrelated thing than OP or I were talking about. I was talking about an open source author protecting *their own code* from being infringed by a company. There *are* resources that do that and enforce the GPL.
You're talking about the *other* thing authors of emulators need to worry about. Which yes, nothing you said is wrong, just off topic.
I really don’t want to have to use SwanStation, I hate everything that RetroArch stands for in compartmentalization of emulation into a huge, confusing single spaghetti program that’s obtuse and (For me) rarely works, I live and die by single program emulators.
I thought I was the only one...
as a nixos user, you know its bad when even nixpkgs isnt sure what to do
nixpkgs actually had an existential crisis about their potential mass GPL violations when this happened, lmao
But yeah the "no packaging" clause sucks specifically for distros like NixOS, which depend on their own packaging to run applications at all
@@mayredwood "existential crisis" is a strong way to put this. Nixpkgs is much better at handling licenses than the AUR, for example. And the supposed legal issues in this case are purely theoretical (in the sense that they haven't actually been put to the test in the court of law and nobody actually knows if repackaging is considered modification and if dynamic linking is derivative work or mere aggregation). So Nixpkgs aren't really breaking the GPL any more than most other distros.
Depending on their own packaging used to be the main reason I don't use NixOS. If I wanted that kind of relationship with my OS developers, I'd use Apple.
@@rightwingsafetysquad9872 I genuinely don't see the parallels you are drawing between nixpkgs and apple. To me they seem like polar opposites.
What crisis? Oh no, I have to use flatpak. Big deal.
What is offensive to the developer about forks? Because they stand on the shoulders of work he did? Is it about credit? Doesn't the GPL require credit be given? If someone were to read his code, which is still available, and then do a complete "rewrite" is he going to pursue legal action because it's not cleanroom? The ONLY thing that I could understand is if he wants a cut of licensing, but he says he doesn't want it to used for profit. But why then, if the code is still out there for free use?
At least from this video it sounds like he just doesn't want people making money off his work for some reason or another. Probably feels like he is being taken advantage of. He puts all this work in to essentially carry this project almost solo and then someone takes his work, contributes nothing, and makes money that should be his but isn't because he wanted to give to the community, not profit. Probably feels like the community around his emulator is being completely ungrateful in wanting to fork this and essentially kick him out of his own project and he would rather burn it down than let ingrates take his work and completely ignore his wishes.
This is pure speculation and is just me trying to wrap my head around this situation though. While he is completely wrong, I can't deny that I would probably be at least a little frustrated if someone else was profiting off my work when I elected not to profit off of it myself.
@@Drazil100 Perhaps he should have read the provisions of the GPL which allow commercial redistribution and sale of the program, so long as the distributor/seller distributes the source code as well. What Arcade1Up did was a breach of the GPL, but they did rectify it and distribute their modified source code once they were called out on it as a GPL violation. If he was so uncomfortable with commercial redistribution of his code, he should have licensed it under a more restrictive license from the start.
@@orangejuche Let me be 100% clear here I am NOT defending the guy. Hey 100% broke his own license. I am only trying to understand what caused him to break his license rather than just straight up calling him a butthole and moving on. Something triggered him to do this and maybe there is a lesson in here or something that would make this less likely to happen.
This guy is not the first FOSS developer to destroy their own project because they are tired of the community. Usually it happens because some project becomes a super necessary piece of software holding up a bunch of modern applications that have no clue the project is even a dependency. Large scale businesses end up relying on this software but nobody cares to even donate to allow the sole developer to justify maintaining the project and at some point they snap and nuke the project.
What he did is completely unacceptable. I do NOT support him handling the situation the way he did... But there is a good chance his reason for doing so, while not an actual excuse, is better than we give him credit for.
Which is ironic because his project explicitly depends on several of his own forks of other FOSS projects to which he's gone out of his way to break API.
He's basically one of those snakes that takes advantage of FOSS communities's goodwill@@Drazil100
fork shall be named quackbox
goosecube
@@howisthis8849 nah that sounds too GameCube like.
QuackersTation
I don't understand why he even changed the license if this is some side project hobby. Just keep it GPL?
Because knowing people steal your work and don't even credit you is the worst feeling. Better to be single than have a cheating husband.
@@doyouwantsli9680 that's bullshit. The entire point of GPL is share and sharealike. The dev is a whiney bitch and should leave the internet forever.
@ALinuxEnthusiastone of the problems is retroarch forking the code and removing all copyright notices from the source code. That should not be allowed under gpl and it is just shamelessly stealing the work of a smaller dev by a bigger organization. Maybe now he’ll have more resources to fight that.
@@Afaik777 Did RetroArch do that? I was under the impression there has been some sort of drama regarding RetroArch, even outside of DuckStation, but I haven't been able to find many resources with a clear explanation.
@@AltieresRohr RetroArch has been stealing code from various authors and violating GPL for years
Shame, shame. I like DuckStation, I think it's the best PS1 emulator, even though I haven't used it much lately because I'm focusing on PSP games right now, but this is really a shame.
4:40 Honestly, he should really do just that. Let somebody else maintain the last GPLv3 version as a fork.
if he doesn't, it would seem then the dev is just a prick and would rather break the toys instead of letting an open version of duckstation to live on .
Duckstation became dead the moment it became proprietary. I'll never donate a dime to his project after this incident.
@@softwarelivre2389 thats just it about the authoer's own words - if he is too busy, why not just let someone else fork it or something? i don't understand the author's reasoning.
@@breadmoth6443 he doesn't need to allow anything. Anyone has the right to fork the code, as it is GPLv3. He is not allowed to release any proprietary version.
You don't have the right to deny someone from doing that. " All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of
copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated
conditions are met. " so they can't prevent it. Anyone forking the GPL version is allowed to do so and has a legal right to do so.
I'm surprised shit like this isn't more common, honestly.
not sure if it is shareware , it can be freeware - epesxe is freeware - just closed source which is a shame.
Because you can't retroactively revoke the GPL. Anyone with the previous build can use its original license, spread it, and then you tend to loose your community to a fork. Its a terrible idea as a dev.
they can't remove access to what they already GPLed but in the FOSS world this kind of rugpull is sadly common
thats because when you do that, and your project is like... relevant... people will fork the older version
if enough people care about your project, and you don't allow contributing to your own project, the fork will most likely win....
~~if not enough people care about your project, the existing and potential people will most likely be scared off by your new license and just stop using your project~~ (this is wrong)
I know not of the drama that caused this license change, but a project I worked on would have been affected by it and was only possible because Duckstation existed as a high-quality PS1 emulator to which I could make and distribute modifications.
Back in 2022, I worked with the Final Fantasy VII speedrunning community to construct a manipulation to be able to control the outcome of one minigame (chocobo racing) to greatly speed up and increase the consistency of clearing that segment of a 100% speedrun. To do this, I needed to be able to accurately simulate millions of races with different starting RNG conditions and in-race inputs. This was only feasible to do because I could construct a hack into Duckstation to automatically run these simulations rapidly and record the results, then leave multiple instances of the emulator running for what ended up being several months of computation time. I could only complete this project because Duckstation existed and let me share modified builds to those willing to run computation time for this project, and its results were and continue to be extremely successful and helpful for the speedrunning community.
This is so similar to the Minecraft mod Sodium which swapped form LGPL to Polyform Shield to stop forks
Isn't there Sodium forks now though?
@@daedalus6433Yep, Embeddium, namely. No idea where either are going to go though
@@mstech-gamingandmore1827 It is an interesting environment, Sodium vs Embeddium. TLDR, the Sodium devs have made the switch suddenly without a clear or reasonable explanation, and they have been doing a lot of finger pointing at the forks including Embeddium over some... interesting interpretations about how things are running.
@@ColonelGerdauf From what I understood of their explanation: They really need money. Sodium is a fabric mod. They tried porting it to forge but Lex (the forge founder) was really rude and kicked them out of the server. Most people use forge. It was a matter of time before ports were made for forge. These ports got way more downloads. Sodium devs are upset because despite taking comparatively smaller effort, ports of their hard work got way more attention.
Demotivated by this and desperate for money, they switched licenses and will only contribute to the new license from now on. There will be a NeoForge port of Sodium (as will there be for Embeddium).
I will leave you to form your own opinions on this information.
@@mstech-gamingandmore1827 It doesn't help Sodium that... what they were USED to fix is now no longer a vanilla issue (yeah, Mojang fixed the rendering and lighting engine for 1.20.x). (This is according to the devs who retired Starlight (a rival renderer to Sodium) after they did benchmark tests that measured the new rendering engine as only benefiting from a renderer mod for a matter of 4 NANOSECONDS less than vanilla, as opposed to entire seconds before the vanilla rendering engine was a thing.
Nowadays unless you're stuck on a Sandy Bridge graphics chip (aka, in 1.16.5 jail) or in a modlist that isn't updated for 1.20.x, Sodium introduces more problems than it solves (and Starlight solves the issues Sodium does without getting all over the code and breaking compatibility with a bunch of custom model mods).
Also IIRC, Sodium breaks Optifine so anything that uses Optifine (or Optifabric) had to be recoded to work with Optifine (this is what Iridium and Embeddium do, IIRC, it's not just a matter of "Sodium was unofficially ported", it's also a matter of "Forge users use Optifine custom model mods a lot and Sodium breaks that, and since Optifine is closed-source Sodium would have to be rewritten to cater to Optifine").
Source: spent way too damn long finding the Goldilocks zone of engine tweaking on Fabric because I had a low-end 2014 Sandy Bridge refurb laptop as my only PC until 2022, and I really wanted custom entity model and custom item model mods and was diligent in combing through the repository issues with Sodium and found out that... yeah Sodium breaks way too much stuff.
I didn't even know you could assign CC to code tbh
Nothing stops you from it, but it's not designed for that, and so more nuanced cases may be ambiguous.
Most CC licenses aren't designed for code and are often not suggested but technically you can apply any licence
lots of Minecraft mods use CC, but it's not recommended, due to CC licenses being designed for pictures or video, not programs.
The author was going nuts and hostile to community for a while, so it's no surprise. Unfortunately, he's also heavily involved with pcsx2 and some of his code in melonDS too (the part that supposed to ease up wayland support but instead breaks it). This is especially ironic because he loves making hard dependencies on his forked versions of other people's projects with completely obliterated API.
I think that his decision is fine, retroarch shouldn't be making bank outta dev works and asking for donations on patreon to make their ecosystem alive. If we have to give money to people it's for the hackers who make the emulators and not some kind of org who steals code and then goes away with it.
The CC license is a strange choice for software...
This one specifically is weird
@@BrodieRobertson People on Twitter argue is it a violation of the license by just compiling the code: you get a remix/derivative of the code after the process :)
This is irrelevant, but i'm imagining now if Linus was like "nah, NO ONE can use Linux anymore!!! >:U" and then activated a hidden backdoor that nuked everyones Linux kernels and bricked their machines.
then we fork the last good version and go without him.
BSD's and GNU/Hurd's wet dream.
@@gogereaver349 and if that fails we move to BSD
That's not how the kernel works
@@AClockworkHellcatlmao
I do care about emulation being FOSS, but in the end, I am an end-user and just care if there is an emulator that just works without hastle. I do think emulation of current gen hardware is sketchy and probably not very good (piracy, license holders cough cough Nintendo, getting involved), but any old generation console emulation, I am all for. I prefer FOSS as I believe that's better for the emulation space, but I can't in good conscious say I care the most about that.
Here's the fun part: no emulator can enforce copyright. The moment it goes to court, Nintendo's lawyers lock on to a new target. We'll see new forks appear within a few weeks, and there's nothing they can do. Emulation belongs to the community, not to an individual
What is the fuss, just fork a version before his change of license and go from there. The version before the license change is still GPL. He has no rights whatsoever to against you doing that on that specific version.
Stenzek seems utterly insufferable from what I've read. I am not surprised this was the conclusion to Duckstation.
People obsessively developing unique niche projects for free are often similarly obsessive about other things. It's not practical or reasonable to give away your effort like that, if he could easily step back and look at what he's doing, he would've moved on years ago
If he wasn't insufferable, you wouldn't have had any of his projects, and the state of PS and PS2 emulation would've been completely different
@@NJ-wb1cz Not PS1. There were already good PS1 emus before DuckStation. ePSXe might be old, but still serviceable, and there's PCSX-redux, which is still maintained. I'm not aware Stenzek is part of that one (I might be wrong though), as to my knowledge, both PCSX and PCSX2 were started by Linuzappz.
Also, CMIIW, but isn't Mednafen's PS1 emu their own? As in, not using any third party emus (I know they use VBA for GBA emu).
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 he's by far the primary contributor to PCSX2, and pcsx-redux is on the order of magintude less popular than duckstation.
It`s kinda like saying, we don't need linux, we have freebsd. Maybe you don't, but without linux the state of unix-like operating systems would've been profoundly different. Maybe it would've been better, maybe worse, but definitely different
I've interacted with him a total of one time. He is an insufferable asshole.
Ares as an emulator is creating their own PS1 emulator, and I'm excited to see how it proceeds going forward.
I mean, the reason that's even the case is because a lot of very stupid people happen to use the software he works on.
A major example of that is that he left PCSX2 (and I can't confirm this, only he knows the reason why) partly because he backported the audio code from DuckStation to PCSX2.
This had the side effect of removing a feature called Async Mix: basically, it makes audio voices (in the audio engine sense of the word, not actual "voices") play at real-time speed, regardless of the current speed of emulation. This had the side-effect of breaking some games that rely on accurate audio timing (like rhythm games, but non-music games could also be affected).
The removal resulted in users, who were using Async Mix because their potato 2006 craptop couldn't run games at full speed, getting mad at the devs, since now the audio will only play to match emulation speed - hence, the audio now plays in slow-mo for them. They would make the excuse that "the game was running FINE before" (when actually, it was running in slow motion: they just didn't realise it because the "normal" audio was kinda tricking their brains.)
I'm assuming Stenzek got threats because of that (far from the first time something like this has happened in emulation) and just quit the project. He even had a PR in the works, but it was closed because he deleted his PCSX2 fork outright, basically signalling a halt to any further involvement in the project. A new contributor moved this code into a new PR of their own, well within the bounds of the license, but it was shot down for personal reasons: Stenzek said he didn't want any of his code being reused (I'm too stupid to fully understand license stuff, but given PCSX2 is GPL 3.0, and Stenzek is considered the copyright holder of his own code, I _believe_ this is enforceable(?)) IANAL.
PCSX2 Right Now 👀
You can already feel the difference, real updates have slowed down to a crawl again, it's mostly controller database and translations... just like it was before Stenzek.
@@Manic_Panic Yeah... I'm on the nightly builds of PCSX2 and it's definitely slowed down.
"Many people have probably never heard of this license"
As part of the Minecraft modding community, unfortunately, I have...
One of the games I like to play from the psx era is Breath of Fire 4 (was my 1st memory of the series, haven't gotten round to trying the 1st 3) so yes I do like to use psx emulators. However I was never a fan of Duckstation, don't remember what my issue with it was but I've only ever had a worse experience with it than good ol' epsxe.
i don't really get what is meant to do. Since you can just fork the last version of Duckstation under GPL and continue the work and the guy said he was done working on the project as the main contributor him abandoning the project would do the same thing he is currently doing.
one of the core things about GPL is you can use continue using the things published under GPL even if what it is attached to goes closed. so making duckstation close source when you don't mean to continue working on it would do nothing.
It's like murdering your child because people are criticizing you for being a shit parent
I emulate...a lot.
While I'm happy most of it is freely available, I have no problem with commercialisation.
I've paid for a license for reDream and bought a gold license for PPSSPP to give back to the developers cos those are awesome emulators.
Duckstation is on that same level of quality, if Stenzek wanted to charge $5-10 one-off for "pro" licenses, maybe put the upscaling and widescreen hacks etc. as premium features, I'd be fine with that.
And if it allowed him to leave his fulltime job and do that fulltime instead, all the better.
I don’t fully get what’s going on. Should I turn off updates in case whoever this dude is spergs out and does something stupid to Duckstation?
You should be find. The only time that happened was with Xenia Canary from my knowledge. It's not out of the land of possibilities. A lot of people who make these emulators, mods, ports, fan games, etc. are nuts. Minecraft and the Sonic community have plenty crazy stories when it comes to their mods, fan games, and 3rd party tools.
Edit: Maybe not a lot, but those few can be loud.
Just don't update anymore, I haven't updated duck station in a while anyway, nothing stays free forever, I knew that from the start when duck station showed up on the scene
Don't update man. He is not in the right in the head. Stenzek has previously added adware and trackers in his app out of spite as Talhreth. He has some mental issues.
Changing code license is not anything new to emulator authors. MAME did had a previous license that forbide any commercial usage, but they changed it when some tech museums started to use MAME and were being attacked by some people due to the licensing issue, so devs changed it from propietary to open source licensing, which in return, allowed unauthorized (but legal) commercial usage.
The problem is people that uses work from others to make money themselves. This is stealing. The entire purpose of the relicensing is to prevent that, and in case of anyone trying to use the relicensed software in a commercial product can be actually sued, rather than just watch how others profit from your work and hobby.
Of course, this particular case of relicensing is having the colateral damage that other means of redistribution and packaging are becoming illegal for the relicensed code. If the author is happy with it, then so be it. Forking the older code and maintain it will be better for GAMERS, but i don't think it will be better for "emulation" in general, since usually nobody with the knowledge will be able to filter what is proper emulation and documentation and what is just a hack. (see what happened with yuzu and citra emulators).
Also, emulation coders usually tend to be quite prone to rage. Yeah, they have the knowledge and skills, but they also are the direct targets for anything wrong that can happen with emulators. not a glamorous life at all, considering the actual world economy.
You are wrong there is no stealing. GPL is based on the concept today I give something to the community. Tomorrow I will hopefully get something I desire back from the community. In this case they can't make money from the use of Duckstation because a rival Company can do the same. All that really is selling is the Hardware and work they did themselves. Is the price ok? I doubt it, but we have a free economy to correct that.
@@michaelklingenstein2626 Wrong. The GPL is based on the concept that the code is the money: I give you the code, i ask for all changes you made to give them back in the open. You can do anything with it (including selling) as long as you give the code back. That's why Linus Torvalds accepted the code from Tivo back then, even when the code cannot be used in any practical event (The hardware was locked to use only the signed firmware) and the same reason linux devs reject changing the license to GPLv3, and insteas, they do still use GPLv2.
In Duckstation case, some seller used it to sell their hardware, without opening the code and did changes to the code without giving it back, violating the license, and earning money commiting copyright violation. Now you have several options, including sue the offender (this cost money) or change the license for another far more restrictive. In Duckstation case, developers just choose restricting even distribution of the code/binaries. Is in their right to do so, like it or not. In MAME case it was the same, but some developers did really sue in private and always the cases were settled, resulting in the opening on the code by force. Not everybody has the money to do that, and even less, when is all about a hobby.
Of course the older code/binaries are available and some other code could continue the work, but i doubt this is going to happen. Just look the Citra/Yuzu case.
That polyform license doesn't seem to give you much more rights than if you found the code without any license whatsoever.
That's basically the point of it, it's explicitly not an open source licence so it's only about the rights of the dev
It gives you massively more rights thatn if you just found a code without any license. The most important one is that you can actually use the software.
@@honza970 No. You do not need the license to use a creative work if you just find it without one. At least in the US.
Most software tries to turn that on its head by guarding any use or even access to it behind an acceptance of an EULA. But it is necessary for them precisely because without any such contract you could just use it without restrictions. This is also why media companies go after users of torrents, but not after users of piracy streaming sites.
Copyright - as the name implies - is about making _copies_ and derivative works.
In the free software world people often say that code without a license is proprietary and useless. And it is absolutely useless _to distributions_ because they cannot package and _distribute_ it at all.
CC BY-NC-ND isn't "proprietary". It just isn't "open source" by the OSI definition.
It is similar to the BS that they pulled with Grayjay.
They are effectively proprietary.
Being able to see the source doesn't mean it is not proprietary. With enough money and signatures on contracts, you can get all sorts of closed-source code.
It still gives ultimate legal control to the copyright holder. The only difference to a proprietary license is that it happens to include a public license, specifically the most restricted one. At least it's an emulator, not a text editor, otherwise this license would be worse than any proprietary license.
Why does emulation have to be ruined by people who can't act like adults..
Because "games are for kids"
It's interesting to see the reaction because I'm feeling a similar sense about my project. The plan was to get a lot of inputs and commits, but in the end it has been done 99.99% by me, effectively removing any incentive to keep the project open source.
I'm not sure what exactly happened or if it was always like that, but nowadays I see many open source projects being solo. Also seeing some license shifts, such as MIT -> AGPL, Apache -> CC BY NC 4.0 etc.
Perhaps there's a natural equilibrium of which projects have the scale to get contributions and which projects are bound to change.
theres also no reason to make the project _no longer_ open source, you might still get contributions and if you lose interest and abandon it people can carry it on.
@@a.lollipop I'm intrigued, I've seen this idea repeated almost word for word so many times that it seems like there's a source. Is there a particular person, like Louis Rossmann, who has popularized this particular wording?
@@FenrirRobu no, it's just logical.
@@a.lollipop so here's my input on the logic: this makes a lot of sense for irreplaceable technology, like medical device software, legacy file formats, firmware for a DVD player, a classic game. In contrast there are the edge technologies, like JavaScript utilities, command line tools, blender plugins and project templates. The difference is that without a hard anchor, it's unlikely somebody will deal with the pain of developing this software. Instead new software will replace it, especially if the license halts further development.
As for contributions, the latest one I saw was an user who said there was an installation error (without details) and that he probably won't try to install again. To me that's basically a customer.
And if I change the license, it does not affect the development since I'm the developer. Having license A or B will never fundamentally influence my work.
The main question lies - if I abandon the project, what happens then. Assuming we're not wishing an untimely passing, I'm still able to change the license at any time. So if I decide this project is finished, I can open source it again. Or someone can find it and request a license change, those happen too (like CC to MIT). Or someone can approach me or my estate about a better licensing deal.
I believe blender is a good example of why proprietary license is never the end.
Finally, let's cover the economical effects - who is losing what. If the license just restricts development, then users are not losing, only derivative product users and competitor developers. However, if nobody else was commiting code, the competition is near 0, at least the open source competition. Therefore, the "open source" dogma does not apply as much when there's no visible community participation. Conversely, when there is a lot of competition, it makes sense to make any projects more open source, sort of like React becoming an open source project despite being an in house investment. Furthermore, supporting open source or closed source developers should not be a barrier. There are plenty of microscopic projects that cost little but bring a lot. So to address the elephant in the room - whatever the license is, most developers will still be able to do better with money than without. And so if a project was 0$, maybe it just means that it now costs 10$ if it's publicly licensed as Non-commercial.
So for these reasons, whenever I hear about "abandoned projects or community" I contrast it to the current situation - who will pick it up? Who is abandoning it?
Side note: I have seen Japan be a lot more fluid about it's sharing licenses. What's often seen is - free for end users, but not for corporations. And no redistribution. Meaning that it's free but you have to encounter the author. These models are interesting because open source is transforming these days, for example - Terraform and ElasticSearch.
@@a.lollipop >"no, it's just logical."
and that's how you know someone never programmed and open-sourced a popular thing before.
As someone who created a website that had over 500k conversions (for the main feature specifically, not counting the other features of the site) and had it open-source, the only other pull requests ever submitted was all from dependabot. The majority of projects will never get outside contributions except on very rare occasions.
Thanks to my experience with my own public open-source projects and the actions and reactions from all the self entitled open source software users for any decision you make (aka 90% of them), I realized that it's better to just create a private repo and invite those you trust to help you with/those who'll respect your license and your choices.
Its software on the internet. He is delusional if he thinks he can control what happens with it.
3.35 I like the fact Stenzek thinks he's being attacked. People like that make me laugh. It makes me think of how many people instantly think someone it just trying to cause trouble when all they are doing is informing and/or trying to help. Listen Stenzek if you are just gonna be a child and threaten to ceace development, go ahead. There are many others wqho are willing to take your place.
Once again, we cannot have nice things because everyone had to be ass.
people are still hell bent on sabotaging GPL
GPL is a terrible license.
Similar license change recently happened with Sodium mod for Minecraft, that had changed its license to Polyform Shield...
I think Stenzek want to avoid duckstation codes stolen and monetized like damonps2 because some of the codes between duckstation and pcsx2 are similar. Yes, stenzek wrote the programming codes for both duckstation and pcsx2
What is it with certain modders amd emulator developers, having huge and fragile egos? They're playing with operating systems and content that technically isn't even theirs in the first place.
Emulation should be free anyways. Charging money for premium features is kinda shady, but what is happening to Duckstation, the dev is a huge tool.
the dev is a huge idiot*
I think it's because it's an extremely deep technical subject that makes you feel like an archwizard for being able to understand it when many others cannot.
Considering he pushing non-commetial licence, its more to protect from being used commertially since GPL makes it impractical with just software redistribution, but don't prevent that if its included or used in commertial products. You need to put in there soues and there finacial situations where you working on project for free for others to use it for free, but someone making lot of money out of your work more then you do and it always sits in back of there head when they paying bills. Making someting FOSS requires guts and confidence, thats why lot of big FOSS projects are company backed, that can earn money out of what they making in alternative ways
OP, your comment reeks of self entitlement
@@the1whoplayz Sounds like something you're guilty of.
What does this mean for duckstation?
Oh nice, so duckstation changed to fuckstation apparently. Good work destroying the goodwill. Bait and switch.
oh no, now all those thousands of people pretending to have legitimate copies of every single playstation game ever released in all regions will now be forced to violate a licence agreement!
It seems to me that the AGPL would have met his goals without the drama. Any license can be violated and can only truly be enforced via courts, especially CC licenses which are not meant for software.
The last GPL version should be forked but not by someone into drama.
It should be someone who has a passion for the project, is actually going to work on it, can play well with others, and is capable of writing useful software.
You don't need someone to fork it for you!
You can't take the code with you when you die. Leave it out there for the betterment of all.
This guy is always whining. It's the same guy that bailed on Aethersx2. He does great work but yeah he seems thin skinned and overly emotional.
Stenzek is the same guy who made the AetherSX2 PS2 emulator for Android. That's the emulator that he pulled and then put ads on because he couldn't ignore random idiot end users.
He is not mentally sound
I didn't know Duckstation was made by an SRB2 dev
Duckstation is definitely not open-source any more, but at least people can fork the last open version. I use emulators a lot, but have never used duckstation... because it's not a retroarch core. And if a decent retroarch core exists, there's no point using anything else. So for psx I've been primarily on libretro-pcsx-rearmed.
My brain just got fried. Can someone sumerise what happened.
Yeah some chad from a different country will fork it and streznek will just cope and seethe because he can't do anything about it. Serves the crybaby right.
Duckstation prior to this license change is already more than functional enough for most casual emulation enjoyers. Doesn't that lessen the blow?
While I don't agree with the decision to change the licence, I can understand the reasons for doing so. They have put a huge amount of work into the project and it's an incredible accomplishment. I don't think it's fair to hold any ill will for the dev or the project, since they do own the rights to their code, just as any contributors have the rights of their contributions. Not wanting to implement a CLA is quite commendable.
Sony: you can't do this to me
AUR did nothing bc technically AUR is not repackaging. The user ir.
Since AUR is just a bunch of automation scripts you can technically alledge that they arent distributing anything, they use the same reason to give scripts to proprietary software that couldnt be redistributed otherwise.
Im not a lawyer basic disclaimer but I dont see that argument being proven in court in this particular case...
This particular scandal made me wonder how much of other open source software one day could make a complete 180 and turn proprietary. I feel bad and almost dont believe in the current open source anymore because now i think that even copyleft licenses like gpl have legal tricks to turn them proprietary without much hassle which means everything i believed was a lie because im not a license expert. I dislike commercialization too so i dont care about that part but the no fork part is sad
any software made mostly by one person can be re-licensed as they own the underlying copyright (will need to re-write the few parts made by others) so anything that isn't made by a large community can easily stop being OSS whenever.
as for GPL see Linus Torvald's complaints about the ant-tivosiation clause and how that was introduced as an example of how the licenses themselves can go bad (note: personally I'd like an anti-tivoisation clause if it applies to the use-cases/industries currently exempted).
@@duven60 well you just confirmed that i cant trust any of the foss stuff now because be it one person, a small group of people or a big corporation they can just make it proprietary any day they want. If some of the participants are against it then all they need to do is to bribe these programmers so they "dont mind" anymore or just rewrite their parts of code if they are stubborn. The only exception is if the project have like thousands of participants and even then its probably possible to deal with it :(
@@miavelvet They can make *new* versions proprietary. Once you receive a version of GPL software they can't just take away your license.
@@Longlius For Linux, only if all developers agree to it it can be changed. For code that belongs to developers that disagree to the change, their code must be removed and depending on the case, rewritten.
Never actually used it as beetle psx usually met my needs
public domain > copyleft > copyright
Well not really. If something is public domain it means anyone can use it however they like. A large corporation can take it, develop it so that it's much better and release it under a closed source license. Now they effectively control that piece of software, since no person will be able to rewrite in their free time what the paid employees did. They will always be ahead.
copyleft >>> all
Not even close. Copyleft licences are a hack to ensure the public still has access and business/users that distribute or sell must contribute back. As Andrei says, closed applications have no such obligations.
@@orbatos public domain is the fate of everything, though, because licenses only apply while copyright is valid.
@@Poldovico In the US, that is lifetime + 75 years which for software is effectively forever.
What does this mean for EmuDeck? They bundle+preconfigure DuckStation on it. So that's a no go from now on?
Nah it'll still work since EmuDeck just uses the flatpak version iirc
@@TheFriendlyInvader Nice to hear, thanks!
Leah my goat
Anyone that knows what Talhret did with AetherSx2 already knows it was gonna happen with DuckStation as well.
I never use any product with waterfowl in its name. Kind of a personal guideline, but it's served me well. Remember when DuckDuckGo got caught lying about not collecting/selling data? Yeah, I dodged that. I'm still using PCSX-R so this isn't fazing me either.
"Yeah, I *ducked that"
I liked it in the movie when the main character turned around and said "It's Forkin' Time"
I'm kinda ok with the change, as many said if someone wants to fork prior to the licence change that's ok, so anyone interested in maintaining can step up and keep the work. Also he can in the future prior to retirement change his mind and open source it again. Many things can happen.
I'm getting deja vu with this situation. Feels like guy is trying poorly replicate something similar to what Byuu/Near did some time ago with bsnes/higan and declaring it free while trying to disavow "unofficial" or commercial forks, but Byuu had much more goodwill built up with the emulation community at the time and IIRC still retained MIT licensing with his emulators even then. Pretty sure Stenzek was around Byuu's forums when that happened, so he probably knows at least on the surface what Byuu went through back then before he ultimately passed, so I would assume as the lead dev of arguably the most accurate (formerly?) open-source PS1 emulator around he would understand what such decisions would mean if he followed through improperly. Something's fishy with the execution of this and likely the overall situation in general.
this expose the fragility of those open source licenses is it just free labor for other parties to profit isn't it?
it depends. Generally, if you contribute some code to my GPL project, you retain the copyright for your contribution, which means I need your permission to relicense.
That is because the code I wrote myself is licensed from me to whoever gets it, but the code you contributed is licensed from you to whoever gets it, including me. I am allowed to use your code so long as I obey the license you put on it, which presumably would also be the GPL so everything is fine.
If I want to change the license later to something that isn't compatible with the GPL, I can do it as the copyright holder for my own code, but I can't do it for yours. You'd have to either legally transfer ownership of your code to me (as in, sell or gift the copyright) or license your code to me again under a different license that is compatible with my new license. Alternatively, I can rip out all the code that isn't mine, rewrite it myself, and then I can relicense when I'm no longer distributing code that someone else owns. This is a key feature of Free Software/copyleft licenses that distinguishes them from permissive licenses that are "just" open source.
If the project were open source but not free software, say under the MIT or the "do whatever the F*** you want public license" (which save for the asterisks is a real license some projects use), then it might be easier. Licenses that allow for use of the code in proprietary software, so if you contributed under MIT, I am allowed to just yoink it and publish it proprietary without asking you or ripping your code out.
The final scenario is when a CLA exists: this is a Contributor License Agreement, which basically outlines the terms under which you the contributor provide your code to me the project owner. In that case, I could require that even though the project is GPL, you license your contributions to me in a permissive way, such that I am allowed to relicense, or even that you just give me the copyright altogether, at which point it's my stuff and I can do whatever with it. So long as I only accept contributions from people who agree to the CLA, I am covered.
It would appear in the case of DuckStation, there was no CLA, but the owner went around asking everyone, some people said yes, some people said no, he took out the parts contributed by the people who said no, rewrote them, and then published the new version under a corresponding license, with permission from everyone whose code was still in the project.
I've never went deep enough with emulators, so I'm not affected, but this is still very much sad. Makes me a bit hesitant to get my feet wet on this branch of gaming.
duckstation is awesome and the outcome of this is important also from a preservation perspective
well seems to me the author is not interested in preservation ... it is sad also that projects die - i would definitely love to contribute if i know how to code , but also an example of projects stagnating is zsnes - it was the best by far as a SNES emulator, but as far as i know still doesn't have an official 64-bit port , but snes9x does , but zsnes is far superior.
@@breadmoth6443 zsnes was already vastly inferior to other emus because the source code was full of hacks and written in x86 assembly. it was fast but its advantage ended right there.
@@breadmoth6443 "far superior" is not what I hear in the romhacking communities I'm in. they consider zsnes to be one of the very worst emulators, due to poor accuracy. what in particular do you prefer about it?
Shame, i still love Duckstation so much. Its my favorite emulator tbh even though im not a big fan of PS1. Being able to do supersampling, getting rid of wobble graphics and playing games in high resolutions is so awesome. Been playing Megaman Legends 2 and Legend of Dragoon on it and its just an amazing experience.
If it's a fight he wants, it's a fight he'll have
Ngl reading some of these comments makes me think the guy made the right decision.
Considering he did most of the commits on the project and he doesn't want people to profit from his work, find this fair, now for the FOSS heads that get all mad about this, it is what it is.
the issue with cores in general does suck massively.
He might as well have kept it closed source then.
Goose Station coming to you next week.
Sad to discover this but glad you posted the video. Duckstation is by far the best emulator I've used to date :(. Very fast, stable, not buggy, etc. If he truly cared about the cause (emulation) - he wouldn't mind people trying to commercialize and profit. This guy seems like a sad, angry micro-managey developer.
Yea, you clearly are not a developer. Companies forking code and profiting off it and contributing nothing back to the source is a problem that harms the emulation scene, and prevents emulators from getting proper recognition and support.
There *are* companies that license emulators legally, and those funds help advance the projects.
@@InakaGames I'm (professionally) SWE lol. Why TF else would I be subscribed to Brodie's channel? I will admit I don't work on FOSS so licensing isn't something I worry nor care much about.
I agree with your statements (generally). But let me put it this way: If I worked on a SIDE PROJECT that I started with 0% intent of making money on myself & I willingly opened-sourced it... I (personally) would not care if people forked it and profited off it. I guess I'm just a free-giving & libertarian kind of guy 🤷
If Stenzek never wanted people profiting from his work he should've never open-sourced it in the first place. He's basically the sole contributor anyways. The dumb ass is just now regretting open-sourcing it in the first place.
how does this affect end user
This is unfortunate. It basically makes it that if he were to disappear, no one could continue it. If he went with polyform shield at least that has a clause to allow forking in the case of abandonment of the project
My guess is thats why the chain license changes. like the first change WAS on the GPL list but also had next one on ITS approved list that list then had the CC on ITS list...
hes the same dev that did aethersx2, not surprising
its a fact that its a stenzek alt, not an opinion;
Lobotomized opinion
Why in the fuck would he create an alt specifically to handle AetherSX2
Holy shit some people lmao
People will just fork an older version of DuckStation. I'm surprised Stenzek doesn't realize this.
Just like when he pissed and moaned at RetroArch until they renamed it SwanStation
Looks like Swanstation is the new PS1 emulator. Some devs are just greedy and don't want to accept that by betraying the community, nobody will trust them any more.
Pcsx?
@@swagmuffin9000 isn't that ancient and abandoned? ePSXe was the one I knew about.
@@Poldovico have no idea if it's abandoned, it's what i use tho. i use pcsx2 and rpcs3 for sony emulation.
How did he betray "the" community ? WHAT ? He's a skilled programmer who made Duckstation as a hobby, he has the right to do anything he want with it, including making it source-available/proprietary even if people don't like that, also, he owns project, most if not all the parts by other contributors has been rewritten by himself, he owes you NOTHING and I don't see how making it source-available/proprietary is betraying the community it's his project he does whatever he wants with it, I'm myself a emulator programmer and most of my stuff is proprietary, people complain every time about this and tell me I HAVE TO open source my things but I don't want to I write code for my own pleasure and I do not care about what people will say.
@@YannBOYERDev what have you worked on?