this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Waaaaaaah
What a fucking baby.
Waaaaaaaaaah, my pet project isn’t fun anymore because arch Linux users reported bugs! Waaaaaaaaaaah
i understand this feels like an annoying move but you are not entitled to labor
But also this guy literally stabbed the entire community in the back by making his project proprietary.
If he's not emotionally mature enough to handle 2% of his user base doing dumb shit then why is he publishing his hobby project? One site uploaded a script to build his project (perfectly legal BTW) and hes going to drop an entire OS platform over it.
Fuck this guy specifically.
Of course not!
I’m sorry, I think this came across wrong. I was just making fun of the whinging.
yea how dare they not work for free so you can have free treats. did i do it right?
I mean, the dev changed the license for duckstation from GPL (totally free license) to a much more proprietary license (some sort of "you can read but may not modify the code" sort of thing). There are other PlayStation emulators, duckstation isn't the only option, and the dev is apparently not a proponent of free software.
Obviously they can do what they like, but so can I, and what I like is free software and devs who understand and appreciate why software should be free. So I will not be using duckstation and instead will use one of the other PlayStation emulators that exist, which have better (freer) licenses and are easily available from the AUR (actually, there's even a libretro core for the PlayStation in Extra, don't even have to go to the AUR).
I care about free software, because I hate private property, especially intellectual property. The duckstation dev clearly does not, they clearly want sole control over their work and don't want anyone else to touch it. That's fine, I won't use it, and they can keep developing for their preferred user base, whoever the fuck that might be.
This is such a non-story, it's hardly going to affect Linux users who want PlayStation emulators, anyone who was using duckstation will simply switch to one of the better options.
A project I kinda like did this recently and switched from GPL to a proprietary license during a major version change, but it definitely made sense because there were companies that were straight up ripping the project and putting it into non-free software then doing nothing to help with development beyond yelling for features.
I can get it in that situation where your project is suddenly being used to make other people money while you subsist on $600/month in donations.
Doesn't really make sense when the project is being used entirely within the open source ecosystem though...
AFAIK GPL prevents this from occurring if you're using v3+
There is no good reason to use a proprietary license, companies and people who treat you poorly will continue to treat you poorly regardless of what slip of paper you have.
It was a whole thing. A large portion of the community got upset they switched from GPLv3 to a custom license. They wanted to biffrucate the codebase so they could sell a Pro version. v2 also changed the schemas which busted my Python library lol
Yeah, I think I came across wrong, my bad.
I really think you're good, at least in this particular case. This dev is absolutely being a jerk, having changed the license from the GPL to a much less free one and then getting pissed that people would dare to package the software for the AUR. I understand the whole "getting support requests from something you don't want to support is annoying and time-consuming", but surely there are other ways to deal with that rather than just making it impossible to use duckstation on Linux full stop.
Whatever though, people will just switch from duckstation to something else (something better, because the other options are actually free software) and this dev will continue developing non-free software and everyone is happy
yes, i don't agree with the way the dev has handled the problems but at the same time i have seen many maintainers really burn down by the same type of entitled users that keeping opening support requests about unsupported builds of the software. this is not just linux users being noisy but keeping reporting things that are very time consuming to debug and many times only reproducible on specific versions that are not maintained by the authors
at the end of the day, nobody will use duckstation on linux and since the userbase is growing maybe the whole project will be forgotten, but i see many people shitting on a dev trying to keep their sanity avoiding supporting a hard to please part of the community. i would imagine that gamers are even more insufferable than normal linux users
Yeah, that was kind of my mindset from the start, but I didn’t articulate, I just shit posted lol
But yeah, changing the license and beginning down the path of hamstringing the Linux community was a bad faith move imo.