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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Is the issue with the packaging, or that only an outdated version can be packaged?
He could fix the license, then people would push the up to date version and users wouldn't report old bugs.
And now it's even worse. Great work.
The solution would be to file trademark and use trademark law to to grant use of the name only to packages that comply with certain mandates. That's how Mozilla handles it. Source code license is the completely wrong approach for this thing.
An approach without tantrums would be to ask Linux packagers to handle packaging needs directly upstream at DuckStation and whenever a new release is made with a bit of scripting to file an automated update request for the packages. I would rope in Arch AUR, Debian Sid, a dedicated Ubuntu PPA, Fedora RPMFusion or a Fedora COPR, and Flathub this way.
Good luck doing that with an emulator which is already a Grey area.
He changed the license in the first place because someone took unpublished code from him and contributed it to another project. He had permission from his other contributors when he did that but people still went on GPL crusades against him.
Now it’s the issue of people re-packaging his releases for other package managers such as AUR (which is against the license) and doing so incorrectly which leads to support requests from the users of broken packages.
There’s a whole community of people who have turned hostile to this guy over his decisions but it comes off as a sense of entitlement on their part. This is after all an emulation community which is full of people who simply use these tools to run pirated old games. They don’t understand the hard work that goes into a sophisticated emulator. They just want more, better, faster! Gimme gimme gimme is all they know!
What was this "unpublished code"? Something committed to a public git repository where all the code is under GPL? You act as if redistribution of GPLed code was somehow illegal or at least immortal. It's not. It's the foundation of the whole idea behind open source.
If that "unpublished code" was stored only on his hard drive and a hacker obtained it illegally, that would be an entirely different topic but that's completely outside the scope of upstream source code license. That would be an outright crime. Developers at AMD, for example, write Linux driver code for AMD hardware. Then before that code leaves AMD, AMD lawyers need to clear it before it gets published to the Linux Kernel Mailing List for review. Sometimes code is not cleared, so the developers need to rewrite it. As long as the code is behind closed doors, it's not published (therefore the GPL does not yet apply) but as soon as it's posted for review, it's public GPL code and everybody can to everything to it as far as the GPL permits.
This is even spelled out in GNU's official GPL FAQ. Edit: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic
That's not how AUR works, it builds from source using instructions, it's not repackaging at all
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.