duckstation-git - non-distribution licence

Nikolai5 · 2024-12-21 22:17:23

The creator of the duckstation project has changed the licence a few times now, none of them that open source friendly, and on multiple occasions has written in the README's of the github page his disdain for the AUR and packaged versions.

A popup on launching the application was added a while back saying that you shouldn't be running a version that isn't the official app image or flatpak, now its changed to a warning that you shouldn't be using "modified builds" and they shouldn't be distributed.

I'm not sure what this means going forward, but nobody else has brought it up here, so thought I'd open the discussion.

Should we change the AUR entry to instead go away and grab the latest app image and package it up?

I don't know what the creator has against people building their own versions, but they really do not like it.

yochananmarqos · 2024-12-21 23:35:02

Nikolai5 wrote:

The creator of the duckstation project has changed the licence a few times now

As far as I can tell, the license has always been Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. The AUR packagers should be including a copy of the license in the package.

Nikolai5 wrote:

the latest app image

FYI, AppImages are already packaged as duckstation-qt-bin and duckstation-preview-latest-bin.

Awebb · 2024-12-22 05:31:06

First of all, before "we" proceed here, make sure the AUR maintainers are onboard with the discussion, because whatever "we" cook up here, they'll have to live with... or not.

The situation is even more problematic than it looks. The duckstation AUR package has been pinned to the latest GPL version, because of the license change, which means that the package won't get any updates ever again. Anyone installing duckstation with an AUR helper will never see the discussion regarding the license change. Those people will go to the Duckstation Discord and ask questions about an old, unsupported version.

What you need to understand about the emulation community, is that it is full of drama and entitlement mentality. People do not put in the necessary work to report bugs, they demand, the shout, they lie, they bully and they do not shy away from death threats. I'd agree that Stanzek's actions beyond the actual coding sometimes seem a bit extreme, but I also see them happening in self-defense. There is a whole lot more to unpack here, because Emulation is one of the biggest mine fields in Open Source and Emulation developers constantly struggle not only with less than civilized behavior, but with people using their software to break actual laws.

Stenzek wrote:

Packagers being collateral damage was a beneficial side-effect, considering they don't clearly mark their versions as modified (also a GPL requirement), break functionality, and expect upstream to provide support.

https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/ … 2348988362

I've talked to Stenzek before on Discord and he is a reasonably reasonable person if approached respectfully. I'd like to hear what our AUR maintainers have to say about the matter, because I think this mess could be sorted out by simply talking to the guy and hammering out some sort of informal agreement, as we seem to have caused support overhead for an upstream developer. With "us" I mean the huge number of fire-and-forget AUR helper users, who do not understand proper procedure. We know this situation first hand, we also do not want spin-off users to flood us with support threats and bug reports and we keep telling them how Manjaro, EndevourOS, ArchBang or whatever they're all called are "not Archlinux" and that they should go and find their own distros support channels.

Nikolai5 · 2024-12-22 13:20:38

Yeah, I agree, the reason I didn't contact the maintainer or anything was because I wanted to make a post here just to raise the concern on the chance that I'm just simply wrong, just wanted to check.

But yes, I agree if there is an issue communication is the best course of action, I can only speak for myself but at the end of the day all we really want is for it to be packaged so that we can install / remove it via pacman, so all applications are being managed in the same place.

Appreciate your insight and it does make sense for the developer to take a defensive stance, especially around where there could be potential legal issues around emulation software.
Just want to add, I'm not intending to cause any drama, but actually the opposite, I just saw something that was potentially concerning and thought to raise it here as I don't understand it well enough to determine there is a problem for sure.

Hopefully some positive agreement could be made in the future, though I'm not sure who best to go about that. Should one of us contact the maintainer of the package to suggest this course of action?

Arch Linux

#1 2024-12-21 22:17:23

duckstation-git - non-distribution licence

#2 2024-12-21 23:35:02

Re: duckstation-git - non-distribution licence

#3 2024-12-22 05:31:06

Re: duckstation-git - non-distribution licence

#4 2024-12-22 13:20:38

Re: duckstation-git - non-distribution licence

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