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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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While users can be demanding, this reads like a very immature response. Going out of your way to block support and prohibit packaging, which you can let others do with 0 seconds of your time, is kinda rude.
Author may have been harassed for all I know, but this is still an emotional response. They could have just said "yeah I'm not supporting this at all, figure it out yourselves if you want to" rather than actively blocking Linux functionality/packaging, which is what this sounds like.
It's not open source. The maintainer relicensed the project from GPL to the current source-available license last year.
The AUR package uses the last GPL release before the change and thus does the current license does not apply.
Seems like just repackaging it would solve the problem a lot easier than alienating a userbase- even if small
The overwhelming majority of Linux users are on 4 distros + derivatives. Debian Fedora Arch Suse not "thousands"
Where would what end? Most actually open source projects just publish releases to source and provide as much or as little support as they feel like. Slap a github issues page up and tell every user that you are only interested in dealing with bugs in the most recent version in whatever official channel you prefer eg provide appimage of releases and insist that users reproduce and document bug.
Time wasted mostly wont even bother to create a github account and if they do close issues if they can't follow directions.
Plus you can just make a flatpak or appimage and be done with it since those are distro agnostic. Wouldn't be the first software where the flatpak is the only supported version and the AUR isn't; see OBS
Higher in this thread they said the author does provide a flatpak, so this didn't seem to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Indeed. If he changed the license to allow packaging the new version, at least all of those reports would be of the current version rather than the last GPL one.
Let the community in and use their time to contribute rather than locking it down as a one man project and then complaining about it.
It should end at the dev putting out some sort of communication stating they're not responsible for packaging, and to reach out to the package maintainers with issues installing from a package and not from the officially documented/supported installation procedure. That isn't out of the norm at all for the open source community, and is one of the main reasons for releasing source code - to enable other people to build it and try to get it to work in whatever environment they want to.
That shouldn't require a change to a much more restrictive license, and it certainly shouldn't require implementing changes to your code that force it to fail on specific OSes (like what was recently added for Arch).
No, the duckstation dev obtained the consent of contributors and/or rewrote all GPL code.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/playstation-1-emulator-duckstation-changes-license-for-no-commercial-use-and-no-derivatives/
So this is more like source available rather than open source...
Open but not free.
Open Source has a specific meaning
There exists pkgbuilds for arch and previously packages of the older GPL builds.
A pkgbuild is just a recipe for each users computer do do the stuff needed to fetch and or build publicly available software. It is copyright the writer of the recipe not the owner of the software thus fetched. That is to say the owner of foobar can't copyright the functional equivalent of a bash script which does git clone and make install foobar.
The older versions thereof are still available under the GPL and aren't subject to being removed.
Neither of these are actually subject to the authors whims. He doesn't own the pkgbuild and if he chooses to offer the file to users they can download it either by manually git cloning it or having a script do it.
So no they didn't "do it anyway"
He explicitly states that it is not 0% of his time due to being bombarded with support requests.
Are you volunteering to field the support requests?
What I'm saying is that a more reasonable stance is to say "package as-is or fork it if you want I will put 0 effort to accomodate".
Others have clarified that they are not as extreme as I thought though so maybe that's fine.
I just think that from a perspective this seems like a "people in X country keep writing gay fanfic about my book and asking if A and B characters are gay. so I'm gonna stop selling there and also destroy All copies left in their language. Because I'm a petty man-child".
But, once again, I hope this is not what's actually happening here and my reading was off.
You cannot fork the current project because it is not open source anymore. A fork of the last available GPL release would be possible, though.
As an open source developer, I’d love to have had contributors to help package my apps. It was killing me maintaining everything by myself. It sounds like the control issues I had when I first had contributors, where I didn’t want others to touch my babies too much when people actually started writing code.
Honestly as a dev, I just don't give a fuck. Is that a licence? MIT is close enough.
I let people pr and if it breaks something, oh well. It's not attached to my real name anyway. A good ci/cd saves time and mental energy so I don't have to publish and test. If I bother.
There's some things like onionos that I've helped out with thst I actually take pride in. But it's all for fun. Why not, it's my time. Code will come and go, but I left things a tiny bit better for all y'all.
You may appreciate the Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License, though more alternatives are usually recommended.
Sometimes external packaging is a huge issue for certain projects, where their support gets flooded with stuff that isn’t in their control and their reputation gets tanked.
…That being said, a PS1 emulator doesn’t seem so extreme to warrant that?