There's been a bit of a furore in the emulation community lately centred around the PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, which has now seen two license changes recently.
… certain parties violating the old license, by not attributing and stripping my copyright. Packagers being collateral damage was a beneficial side-effect, considering they don’t clearly mark their versions as modified (also a GPL requirement), break functionality, and expect upstream to provide support.
As a maintainer of few AUR packages this is always so hurtful.
Where does this position come from? Packaging is the avenue that people using any linux distro use to get your software.
This also my first time hearing that packages (re)building GPL code have to mark the packages as modified in some way. I can understand that being a valid concern (if it is one) but that’s a problem that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
For every one maintainer coming to your github issues with their problems there is probably shitton of patches and time spent on making your program work with the given distro.
Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.
He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.
As far as I understood things, he’s always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.
Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I’ve got them blocked and I’m not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.
Emphasis mine, snipped from the authors comment
As a maintainer of few AUR packages this is always so hurtful.
Where does this position come from? Packaging is the avenue that people using any linux distro use to get your software. This also my first time hearing that packages (re)building GPL code have to mark the packages as modified in some way. I can understand that being a valid concern (if it is one) but that’s a problem that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).
I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.
For every one maintainer coming to your github issues with their problems there is probably shitton of patches and time spent on making your program work with the given distro.
Iirc, the creator of Duckstation has been salty about repackaging his stuff for a good while. He had disagreements with how RetroArch made a core from his emulator, citing some sort of licensing violation (not asure the validity). So someone forked his codebase and made the Swanstation core, and he publicly exploded and ceased development of Duckstation.
He must have come back at some point for his opinions to be relevant again I guess.
As far as I understood things, he’s always been touchy about what others chooss to do with his code, even having negative reactions to basic bug fix pull requests.
Apologies if the other response comment covered some of this. I’ve got them blocked and I’m not going to even try to figure out who on my block list it is and why.