DuckStation
github.com
github.com
Changing the license will only hurt the legitimate interested parties of the future, as nefarious people who fork and rebrand and charge for such programs have a tendency to be unscrupulous and don't care what the license says. It does help with filing claims, but that can be wack a mole.
It would be nice if they would grant non-commercial non-monetary derivatives at least, so people who want to fix code after the author moves on can do so in an honorable manner.
Another solution might be perhaps a termination clause saying that after some multiple of 5 years that it will revert to GPL-3 again. So at least if the worst happens the software can live on.
[0] https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/commit/7f4e5d55dbdef5...
molticrystal points out the commit in which the licence is 'changed'. Some files which were previously labelled as being dedicated to the public domain ('Unlicense') are now indicated as being under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International License, version 4. This an is untrue statement at the specific commit, because work in the public domain cannot be copyrighted (this is a simplification, but substantively true). However, it will become a true statement and thus legally significant as and when new, original code is added in future commits, as this would be copyrightable.
More importantly, there are other files which previously contained this declaration:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-3.0 OR CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0)
Contributors to the project generally continue to hold copyright to their commits under the 'inbound-outbound' doctrine, and this is reinforced by the GitHub terms of service. That means that the main author has to respect the licence terms too.
Here's the problem: by changing the licence of the whole program to only the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, they have to have violated one of the two original options. If they use their rights from the GPL, they must retain the GPL option for others (copyleft principle); if they use their rights from the CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 licence, they cannot make derivative works so won't be allowed to continue developing the project!
All in all, this is just yet another case of 're-licensing' a formerly free and open source project that has no grounds in law. More positively, it is also therefore another case of the inbound-outbound effect of collaborative development strengthening FOSS.
> You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.
However, DuckStation supplies prebuilt bundles that don't allow for that, in the case of Windows.
The bigger problem is that re-licensing is... Hellfire. You require specific permission from all involved, every single person who agreed to previous terms. If a single person does not grant permission, you either cannot transition, or must strip out everything of their work - and anything their work may have further led to. They can't be the inspiration for anything.
You also cannot relicense something once you've placed it in the public domain (99.99999% of the time).
So... Begin your history with one license, you're fine.
Try and change it... Hire a lawyer first.
If they own the copyright to all of the code that was published, then they can use that right to relicense the code however they like without violating either of the licenses. That would, however, presume that they either did not accept contributions from anyone else prior to the change, had contributions assign them copyright, or removed code by those contributors.
And, of course, changing the license on new code doesn’t revoke the rights granted to people by the previous licenses if they had the code already.
The short form is that there are some developers who *actively forbid* distribution of binaries you create simply on the grounds of "Your shitty build will send hate my way and I don't want that."
And it's true. I know several people who maintain emulators and hot damn do some people on the internet go "I used your emulator and my computer crashed/wife left me/dog died, you suck!" only to find out that this person is running xXxHotTaterBucketXxX's build from 3 years ago that has more bugs than a cricket farm. This happens on a surprisingly regular basis too.
I maintained a very small tool at one point that handled patching PSP games. someone about once a week would email me and every time they had an issue it was boiled down to "you downloaded a version of this tool off a forum from somewhere with unofficial patches." Getting people to download a new version was hard.
The vast majority of people who use emulators don't know the first thing about how they work nor do they care. they want their games and they want them now. and anything that stands in between them and their goal is literally hitler.
It may be that I'm a picky bitch about these things, but retroarch has been an absolute mess lately. I can at least see where Stenzek is coming from. These people just do not care the way they ought to for such a problem. Retroarch is regression city.
Stenzek's skills as a software engineer are unparalleled and I have to imagine he knows what he's talking about.
Stenzek changed the license because he had a meltdown last month when PCSX2 changed it's license from the LGPL to the GPL (which is allowed by the LGPL; there's nothing dubious about making this change)[1] for... some reason. In response, he threw a tantrum and closed all his open PCSX2 PRs, effectively quitting the project[2][3][4].
RetroArch is a plague on the emulation community, but that's not why Stenzek relicensed his emulator.
[0]: If this is actually incompatible will largely depend on your views how the GPL interacts with dynamic linking. Don't just repeat the FSF FAQ, look for other legal opinions not written by free software advocates.
[1]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11648
[2]: https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/11315
Pretty sure it's because he would be "forced" to open-source Aethersx2 (which is an android port of pcsx2).
It would only prevent him from using code added after the switch to GPL, which is not a problem because AetherSX2 ended development long before PCSX2 switched to the GPL.
Which is a massive win when you want to run emulators on devices without mouse/keyboard, and more than makes up for minor performance issues or having out-of-date cores.
It's really sad that he still hasn't been pushed out yet.
And I guarantee you nobody on the libretro team is "profiting" off of other emulator projects unless you consider the RetroArch patreon donations to be part of that, but that money often goes back to developers funding bounties and other work/hardware for development... and it exists irrespective of any cores they might support.
The claim that they never update their forks is also demonstrably false. There are some cores that lack a maintainer, but it's not like they are actively being hostile in some way by not updating something. Also keep in mind that they host hundreds of different cores and all the builds for them across a dozen+ platforms, which is thousands of different build combinations, something I've never seen in ANY other single software project on earth (unless you count an operating system I guess). And some people only want to work on certain cores, or just RA.
I think attitudes like this is exactly why nothing ever changes in the emulation scene.
Without it, emulation on Steam Deck and Miyoo/Ambernic-style devices would be nowhere near as good an experience.
And if you're focused on emulating 8/16bit games, it runs the vast majority of them just fine. (If you want to emulate, say, Gamecube or beyond, that's when you're better off with individual standalone emulators)
https://libretro.com is ad-free
No hardware I tested has any problems with any emulator and most emulators still run better than the main port.
If you were referring to another retroarch site you went to the wrong site which could explain your problems, but please open a bug report if you really have such a bad experience with retroarch and maybe try another libretro frontend.
Sadly I consider your comment as FUD since I can't collaborate/verify any of your problems on any hardware... I'm sorry. If you really downloaded retroarch from a non official source, please check your PC for malware.
Edit just to clarify I'm not associated with retroarch even though I provided code a few times in the past. I'm still using it from time to time, but I hadn't had contact to anyone from this project for years. I'm just an independent dev who hates FUD...
I know he gets a lot of hate for sabotaging his own emulator (Aethersx2) with ads, and DuckStation subsequent change to a restrictive license, but still think his positive contributions to emulation still considerably outweights these negative ones.
Also let's cut him some slack, it wasn't long ago he got over-harassed by the Retroarch devs to the point they sent email to their irl employer with damning accusations of sexual harassment.
https://x.com/BlueMaxima/status/1488826694626525185?t=16bZ3F...
https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/ https://x.com/docsquiddy/status/1488624125686001666?t=7IduLR... https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/s/82JBF0S27r
- There's no proof aethersx2 is his project. But there is proof that it violates open source licenses.
- No proof of death threats from users
- No proof of "sabotaging his own emulator"
- No proof he "got over-harassed by the Retroarch devs to the point they sent email to their irl employer with damning accusations of sexual harassment."
It has been long established in the emulation community that stenzek and tahlreth are the same person
https://np.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/15l4km1/...
https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/1e5337f...
> - No proof of death threats from users
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/103836y/aethersx...
Here is an example of email he got: https://imgur.com/Oze5aYG
> - No proof of "sabotaging his own emulator"
https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/11q75wr...
> - No proof he "got over-harassed by the Retroarch devs to the point they sent email to their irl employer with damning accusations of sexual harassment."
EDIT: Okay, so the employer's email alleging harassment was to another emulator dev (redream), I misremembered it, but the harassment is still real.
https://x.com/BlueMaxima/status/1488826694626525185?t=16bZ3F...
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstati...
Do your own research
Everything is up to people's personal consideration so that really isn't saying all that much.
Specifically, it violates freedom 3 of the FSF definition (redistribute changes), and section 3 of the OSI definition (Derived Works). This freedom is at the core of what FOSS is.
And that's before the violation of freedom 0, "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose" of the non commercial licenses.
Makes me wonder what the general statistics are on individuals ignoring licensing entirely.
Time to go make the ultimate SPDX-License-Identifier with an OR clause between every single entry.