Playstation 1 emulator "Duckstation" developer changes project license from GPL to PolyForm - eviltoast
  • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Not to excuse the developer but I empathise with why they might have felt compelled to change the license.

    One of the biggest pains for any open source project is distributions and packagers who package the software themselves yet make changes or configure in non-standard ways which leads to major overheads for upstream as everyone submits bug reports for bugs introduced down stream and have nothing to do with them.

    I feel we, as a community, need to be more vocal about when a project has been modified from the original source for packaging or distribution (where those changes weren’t pushed upstream) to demand the project be renamed in that instance.

    I feel for these small developers who do this in their spare time and find the community forcing more work on them and damaging their reputation without any fault of the developer but someone downstream who doesn’t care not want to support what they’ve packaged.

    Perhaps there are other solutions? Before other projects decide to use awful licenses and infringe on rights just to try and tackle the problems created by downstream.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      This developer offers flatpak and AppImage builds, both of which try to solve the problem of distributions making their own distribution-specific changes.

      It’s not a perfect solution, but there are some packaging systems trying to move in the right direction.