Waaaaaaah
What a fucking baby.
because as someone giving up my free time and not being compensated in any way, I shouldn't have to deal with this.
Waaaaaaaaaah, my pet project isn’t fun anymore because arch Linux users reported bugs! Waaaaaaaaaaah
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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yea how dare they not work for free so you can have free treats. did i do it right?
I mean, the dev changed the license for duckstation from GPL (totally free license) to a much more proprietary license (some sort of "you can read but may not modify the code" sort of thing). There are other PlayStation emulators, duckstation isn't the only option, and the dev is apparently not a proponent of free software.
Obviously they can do what they like, but so can I, and what I like is free software and devs who understand and appreciate why software should be free. So I will not be using duckstation and instead will use one of the other PlayStation emulators that exist, which have better (freer) licenses and are easily available from the AUR (actually, there's even a libretro core for the PlayStation in Extra, don't even have to go to the AUR).
I care about free software, because I hate private property, especially intellectual property. The duckstation dev clearly does not, they clearly want sole control over their work and don't want anyone else to touch it. That's fine, I won't use it, and they can keep developing for their preferred user base, whoever the fuck that might be.
This is such a non-story, it's hardly going to affect Linux users who want PlayStation emulators, anyone who was using duckstation will simply switch to one of the better options.
A project I kinda like did this recently and switched from GPL to a proprietary license during a major version change, but it definitely made sense because there were companies that were straight up ripping the project and putting it into non-free software then doing nothing to help with development beyond yelling for features.
I can get it in that situation where your project is suddenly being used to make other people money while you subsist on $600/month in donations.
Doesn't really make sense when the project is being used entirely within the open source ecosystem though...
putting it into non-free software
AFAIK GPL prevents this from occurring if you're using v3+
There is no good reason to use a proprietary license, companies and people who treat you poorly will continue to treat you poorly regardless of what slip of paper you have.
It was a whole thing. A large portion of the community got upset they switched from GPLv3 to a custom license. They wanted to biffrucate the codebase so they could sell a Pro version. v2 also changed the schemas which busted my Python library lol
Yeah, I think I came across wrong, my bad.
I really think you're good, at least in this particular case. This dev is absolutely being a jerk, having changed the license from the GPL to a much less free one and then getting pissed that people would dare to package the software for the AUR. I understand the whole "getting support requests from something you don't want to support is annoying and time-consuming", but surely there are other ways to deal with that rather than just making it impossible to use duckstation on Linux full stop.
Whatever though, people will just switch from duckstation to something else (something better, because the other options are actually free software) and this dev will continue developing non-free software and everyone is happy
Yeah, that was kind of my mindset from the start, but I didn’t articulate, I just shit posted lol
But yeah, changing the license and beginning down the path of hamstringing the Linux community was a bad faith move imo.
yes, i don't agree with the way the dev has handled the problems but at the same time i have seen many maintainers really burn down by the same type of entitled users that keeping opening support requests about unsupported builds of the software. this is not just linux users being noisy but keeping reporting things that are very time consuming to debug and many times only reproducible on specific versions that are not maintained by the authors
at the end of the day, nobody will use duckstation on linux and since the userbase is growing maybe the whole project will be forgotten, but i see many people shitting on a dev trying to keep their sanity avoiding supporting a hard to please part of the community. i would imagine that gamers are even more insufferable than normal linux users
i understand this feels like an annoying move but you are not entitled to labor
Of course not!
I’m sorry, I think this came across wrong. I was just making fun of the whinging.
But also this guy literally stabbed the entire community in the back by making his project proprietary.
If he's not emotionally mature enough to handle 2% of his user base doing dumb shit then why is he publishing his hobby project? One site uploaded a script to build his project (perfectly legal BTW) and hes going to drop an entire OS platform over it.
Fuck this guy specifically.
So if I’m understanding this right, they don’t want to try to fix the linux version anymore so they’re just completely breaking its ability to run on linux at all? What kinda sense does that make?? What a baby. They couldda just said they weren’t gonna update it anymore
And due to their license choice, no forking to get around it (legally). Would need to distribute a script and patch instead.
They offer downloads in Flatpak (think this is removed now) and Appimage. They are upset that people are having problems with third party packages for different distros (mainly Arch) and reporting those bugs as if they're the developers fault.
It wastes a ton of time and resources to filter through these vs. legitimate bugs for something the developer doesn't officially support anyway.
Emulator developer says they refuse to support Linux anymore
Bold move, we'll see if it pays off. It'll just be forked like what already happened once with SwanStation.
The current license does not allow that. It saw hostile relicensing a year ago https://vimuser.org/duckstation.html
Always the same story - If the software isn't free, then your use of it is legally bound to the random whims of some guy. Fingers crossed a fork from pre-hostile licensing takes over.
Shit, I didn't know he did that. The kinds of nerds who use Linux are exactly the kinds of nerds who use emulators, so either way it's a baffling choice to turn actively hostile on them.
who gives a fuck about the license?
the source is there, nothing is stopping people from forking it except a markdown document
who gives a fuck about the license?
the license actually is what permits distributions to package Duckstation and spread it to more people. What this credit to society did was go scorched earth on everyone who worked with him because of his crash out.
Funny enough that the AUR is just a script to download and package duckstation, he literally has no legal basis to take the script down because his license doesn't actually apply.
Stenzeck is a loser who hurt everyone who cared while the people who victimized him dont give a shit.
this would be very similar to pirating game, which is totally fine for me but in practice is very hard to form a community around writing code for it. i doubt someone would enforce the license in a "pirated" fork but still many open source devs trust and comply with licences to some extend
who gives a fuck about the license?
The legal system, unfortunately
IP lawyers are usually too expensive for non corporate entities to wield. Is this dev willing to put 400K of his money where his mouth is?...signs point to no.
Unfortunately I’m not sure forking is an option. After the SwanStation thing, DuckStation switched to a more restrictive source-available license, and if I’m reading it right I believe that forking would be in violation of the license. This section specifically is what I’m looking at:
- Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:
a. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and
b. produce and reproduce, but not Share, Adapted Material for NonCommercial purposes only.
I am not a lawyer though so I could be misunderstanding. I do wonder if someone won’t just try forking it anyways regardless of legality.
Just do it anyway he says he doesn't make money from it, what's he going to do, sue over his free project 
scratches head
If we're already "pirating" games... are we expected to be the kind of people who will submit to an arbitrary set of words in a .txt file to keep us from something?
most of the open source devs do, to an extend. i would not be surprised if some of them took the "only backup of your own games" seriously.
Bold move, we'll see if it pays off.
hardly anyone uses Linux, they'll be fine
Steamdecks have changed this and the venn diagram overlap for gaming on linux is most of its circle.
I don’t see why steamdeck users wouldn’t run retroarch which has plenty of PS1 cores including a working duckstation one. Nobody I know of is using a standalone emulator for anything ps1 or below
Maintainer: 
End users being charmed, then rugged once again by a non-free project: also
Average stenzek crashout a talented developer ofc but does seem to actively seek out shit to annoy themselves with.
The last time I remember something like this happening was from mobile users complaining in mass that their $100 phones couldn't play games and they pulled the mobile app because of it. In that case, probably dealing with thousands of actual children yelling at them on Discord or wherever.
They could definitely do more to distance themselves from these groups of massive (literal) babies, but I think the insufferability of the mobile and Arch communities are well known enough to others that I totally understand.
Lmao stenzek stay mad good you willingly purged yourself from the community go enable copyright infringement for the more massive amounts of children on windows than there ever was on Linux.
Just grep the source for "wayland" and you'll see what I mean.
Dont let the door hit you on the way out, fucking poser.
Add-on: apparently he does issue tracking and bug reports through Discord, but this is just what ive heard.
What a lack of theory does to a mf.
oh damn I just started using that one. Welp.
Give mednafen a go otherwise the retroarch core (beetle psx) has been fine for me for ages
common Mednafen W
i enjoy seeing so much anger from the crowd whose answer to most PC issues is "install Linux"
That's the correct answer
Seems fair to me, this is their ball they made themself and they weren’t having fun anymore so they went home and took it with them. Don’t really see the issue besides some vague entitlement to a fork of their work
They didn't make it themselves, the project has a not-insignificant amount of contributions from other authors, and the repo owner (possibly illegally) relicensed it such that nobody else can legally fork it.
Aren't license changes only applicable to forward development? Like if the project was GPL up until state Y, then switches to something else, that license only applies to ∆Y?
Yes. They did the relicensing a year ago, so that's a decently sized delta.
Just fucking crib it anyways and either play dumb or threaten him to sue. He won't. IP laws shouldn't be respected anyways.
Agreed on the first half, it's unfair to expect someone to continue volunteering their time to work on something if they don't enjoy it. I don't understand what you mean by "vague entitlement to a fork of their work" though? It's not like stenzek has to do any work if someone else forked DuckStation to continue supporting Linux on their own. What people want is the freedom to use, modify, and distribute code for the benefit of everyone. Presumably as a member of this website's community you are opposed to private property, how is restricting people's freedom with proprietary code any different?
Well then. I guess if I ever use this again I'll just put it through Wine.