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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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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"