• 15 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • What was this “unpublished code”? Something committed to a public git repository where all the code is under GPL? You act as if redistribution of GPLed code was somehow illegal or at least immortal. It’s not. It’s the foundation of the whole idea behind open source.

    If that “unpublished code” was stored only on his hard drive and a hacker obtained it illegally, that would be an entirely different topic but that’s completely outside the scope of upstream source code license. That would be an outright crime. Developers at AMD, for example, write Linux driver code for AMD hardware. Then before that code leaves AMD, AMD lawyers need to clear it before it gets published to the Linux Kernel Mailing List for review. Sometimes code is not cleared, so the developers need to rewrite it. As long as the code is behind closed doors, it’s not published (therefore the GPL does not yet apply) but as soon as it’s posted for review, it’s public GPL code and everybody can to everything to it as far as the GPL permits.

    This is even spelled out in GNU’s official GPL FAQ. Edit: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic



  • Is there a specific interaction that made them angry?

    Stenzek’s feeling got hurt when DuckStation was still proper open source software and people used the software fully in accordance with its license, i.e. they distributed modifications and not all permitted modifications were the most polished ones, so he felt that they give his name a bad reputation. Again: Stenzek released DuckStation under a license that explicitly allows this.

    So he rage quit open source and released new DuckStation versions under a very restrictive “source available to look but not touch” license that’s so insanely restrictive, Linux distributions are not allowed to make their own packages. So they ship the old version that works just fine because PlayStation 1 emulation was figured out very long ago. Stenzek feels that they should not ship the old version (which they are fully entitled to) and instead make a special exception for his software alone to point their users to DuckStation’s website where instead of acquiring the emulator from their package manager (or “app store” in case you’re not familiar with that term), Linux users should take extra steps to manually download and install DuckStation.

    And since users may not know about this rift, they may post bug reports and feature ideas to Stenzek, even though these bugs may have been long fixed by non-open source DuckStation.

    Basically: Stenzek did not read the license he picked for his software and then got mad when people made use of provisions explicitly allowed by the license.




  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldtoAndroid@lemmy.worldThe state of Android ROMs
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    14 days ago

    That answer is at best only partially right.

    The real answer is that Pixels were, until very recently, Google’s officially supported reference hardware in AOSP while everything else is a community port of some GPL compliance source code dump.

    Community ROMs are Pixel first because Pixels just work.

    It’ll change now that Google decided to no longer release Pixel adaptions directly as AOSP and the community will have to port that the same way as for any other vendor, especially if a vendor decides to maintain their adaptions in LineageOS.


  • That’s a problem with most ports. It’s a “new” game on Switch

    There is no mandate by Nintendo that ports must cost 70 Euro, the 3rd parties simply follow the example set by Nintendo. They could sell it for 50 but chose not to.

    People who have more than one gaming system have little reason to buy Switch versions of their games. Of the announced Switch 2 games, I already have MK World and looking forward to Metroid Prime 4. Everything else I’m looking forward to, I rather play on Steam Deck where deals are much better and I get stuff like cloud saves for free.