this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
714 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
73546 readers
2387 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
Hi, I'm a subsystem maintainer for the Drupal project, a security team member, and over the years have helped maintain several of the largest projects in the ecosystem. I've also contributed to a number of open source projects over the years and have a lot of experience collaborating with maintainers to get fixes committed going back to early amd64 fixes coming out of testing in the gentoo project before Intel even had a real 64bit platform. I've got a pretty good feel for how this works and it's safe to say FLOSS is kinda my day job.
You got me, I'm impersonating some other neclimdul guy that's easily Googleable and matches the description I gave. I registered this account two years ago and participated in discussions all this time so I could trick you specifically Hawkeye. You really did call me out. Good one.
you act like it's impossible for anyone to go register that name.
I don't know who you are. I didn't even google your name because I really don't care enough who you claim to be.
my point is, your original comment called him out as petty and even so I believe that's warranted. if a group of people are using the tools that he created in a way that he doesn't like or want, is he not entitled to make a change to stop that from happening?
at that point the whole community could fork the repo and do their own thing. but no, entitled shitlord users want to post ragebait shitposts and call the dude an asshole for putting his foot down and drawing a line because he's had enough of entitled shitlord package managers.
the guy didn't do anything wrong, because as the maintainer he has the sole responsibility and vision of where he wants to take his project. the community isn't wrong is forking it either.
the only people who are wrong are the ones calling him a petty bitch asshole for doing the thing he's supposed to do!
You say you don't care who they are but you're the one who first claimed to know that, when you called them "an anonymous user who has never contributed to foss outside of a whiney bug report or two.". You seemed to think it very important. Moreover, it's not impossible for the user to have been impersonating a FOSS developer for a couple of years, but what do you think the probability of that is? What would they gain? It seems far more probable that they simply are the same person.
Noone called the developer a "petty bitch asshole" from what I saw, putting words in others' mouths doesn't seem to help the discussion.
I agree with your overall sentiment that we can sympathize with the dev, even if they're obviously not perfect themselves. FOSS is hard for everyone engaging with it.
It is a games console emulator project. Noone's livelihood or business hinges on this AFAIU, and there are alternative emulators for the PS. If anything I'd hope people - maintainers, contributors, users - would be more cool and relaxed about it. It's the kind of project I wish would give everyone involved more energy and experience for other endeavors in their lives. What's even the point if it's not fun?
In short no. At least not if you're software is GPL, then you don't have any say in how its used. Its the bargain we make when we choose an open license as it specifically grants the right to use software freely. So up to last year, he has no say in how its used. And honestly, If download and compile the CC version today he doesn't get any say either. For the most part even proprietary software like Windows don't get a lot of say in how things are used either if you pay for it.
There are forks of the GPL code. They're in the fork tab in github. Also a trip to google finds this version https://github.com/libretro/swanstation which appears to have been forked for 4 years now. There are also other PS emulators that seem more popular in things like retropie where it would be more widely distributed so not sure how much interest there actually is.
So none of the aurs distribute anything built on arch infrastructure, its all unmodified versions exactly like his license and readme specify.
Sure, he can do what ever he wants I guess. Accept what ever PR, commit what ever code. He can even delete everything tomorrow(I believe he's done it before?) because he thinks neclimdul specifically is a jerk and was mean to him on lemmy and no other reason. That doesn't make his decision good or reasonable or right. I mean you don't seem to like me but I hope you get my point.
But just to really be clear why I think this was a jerk move, https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/blob/master/CMakeModules/DuckStationBuildSummary.cmake#L38
This doesn't block packaging, it blocks compiling on any arch system. Its a poison pill because he didn't like some people using a specific distro and doesn't really affect me but strikes me as pretty petty.