the license changes were made to deter parties who had violated the previous license [GPL] by not attributing the work and stripping copyright information
That is a violation of the GPL. Changing the license isn’t going to stop license violations. It’s really unfortunate when software gets into legal hell.
no it isn’t. The old versions are still GPL. permission from contributors was attained.
As much as all of this sucks, the part where they said if this devolves into harassment they’ll shut the whole thing down is so valid. Let people enjoy their hobbies.
Someone should fork the last GPL version and pull it into libretro
Can’t really see how it’s worth anyone else contributing to this version of the project anymore with such a hostile-to-open-source owner
This is FUD
The libretro/retroarch devs are the problem and why the license was changed.
Open source != owned by everyone
Exactly my thoughts. The project is going to remain open source, but not free. I hate when people fail to recognize the difference between free software and open source software.
According to the definition from the Open Source Initiative, “open source” also requires free redistribution. See the first point (emphasis mine).
- Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
It also requires freedom to distribute modifications:
- Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
CC-BY-NC-ND is not “open source” (both due to the NC and the ND), it’s more of a “source available” type of license (when applied to source code). The difference between “free software” and “open source” is more ideological than anything else, they both define the same freedoms, just with different ideological objectives / goals.
open source but not free
You mean source available then. Do not conflate these terms, please.
Libretro folks are going to take the code of any maintained emulators anyways, so people don’t really need to port it. Also didn’t follow any news from Libretro’s side, but considering Libretro’s founder’s past interactions in license changes of emulators the project benefited from, I can’t help but wonder if he/she threw a hissing fit at the Duckstation folks as well.