709
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
709 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
73512 readers
2883 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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/