Oh. Time for a fork. -ND variants are not Free Software / Open Source.

It's more than just FOSS users. It's "The Internet" in general. At least two of the modding scenes I've been in have had multiple developers (and artists and translators) just quit due to their users aggressively complaining about the stuff they give away for free.

Of course, it doesn't get that much better when people have to pay for things -- ask customer service representatives how much toxicity they see from unsatisfied customers.

You are the only one here carrying on a grudge and being vocal about it.

Are you a big fan of FOSS? How much are you going to support FOSS developers today hmmm?

The point is that someone posted this guy’s project to the AUR with a badly written PKGBUILD and it was failing to build. This led to him getting tons of support requests which he could not help with since he doesn’t control that AUR build.

He also couldn’t get it removed from AUR without giving the admins his personal information. Completely understandable given the history of console companies going after emulator developers. The guy has been doxxed and seems close to being run right out of the open source community by a bunch of zealots.

Not a license expert but he changed the license to a more restricted one but did not ask contributors which the previous license may have required.

Higher in this thread they said the author does provide a flatpak, so this didn't seem to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Daniel still has the RetroArch trademark registered in his personal name and continues to oversee the project and that's enough for me that he's still in a mangerial role, but you're right in that the last shitty thing I heard about him is fucking up netplay in 2022.

Having read a lot of the thread it sounds like that's sort of what's going on with the version on the AUR. Sounds like it is the old GPL v3 version and the dev doesn't wanna put the new CC BY-NC-ND version on the AUR themselves because they don't want to make an account there (understandable, not saying they should have to).

The whole situation is sort of sad, but ultimately devs working on free (as in money, I now -ND is not libre) software need to do what they need to do to remain sane. If it's a CC BY-NC-ND emulator without Linux support versus no emulator at all I think we'd all want the first.

I hope this thread can be an eye opener for folks to remember to treat volunteer devs with respect. (Not implying anyone here was part of the problem.)

He took an open source project and made it source available. I don't blame people for being upset.

I use the Duckstation flatpak funny enough

True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.

And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.

I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.

The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.

CC4.0 licenses work for code. The language was made generic and no longer talks about performing music on stage and such.

Better to use CC NC for non commercial works than to homebrew your own text. CC BY and CC BY SA are GPLv3 compatible.

AFAIK they did.

AUR can. It’s just locally checking out the code from git and compiling it locally as well. I’m not a pro AUR maintainer but I’m not aware of a single AUR entry that ships software source code directly from AUR.

To write a script that checks out upstream code and compiles it locally is not a distribution by a 3rd party. The code comes directly from Stenzek. That’s why he puts the Arch check there.

If that script happens to do a search and replace of archlinux with some random jibberish (so the check is no longer for archlinux), that’s still not a distribution of modified code because all code modifications happen locally.

Normal people would just invite distribution packagers to develop fixes upstream.

Who forces him to respond to such messages on Discord? He can just not engage with people of whom he thinks are idiots.

If he doesn’t want to engage with users at all, maybe not set up a Discord in the first place.

No. Every time FOSS comes up on Lemmy, FOSS adherents remind me why I'd never dip my toe in that mess.

I use some open source, but I also pay to support it, so I'm not true FOSS. See: Home Assistant. I contribute to the support at times, and I'm familiar with the frustrations - and the need to be consistently cordial. And thick skinned.

For all you know you're talking to someone on the spectrum. Perspective matters.

I don't use Arch but I have noticed a growing number of forums where people seem to talk about a lot of problems. I have used Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu etc. But Arch stands out as the distro that seems to have the most helpless users. Or is it the most broken distro?