Best PS1 Emulator Just Became Proprietary Software 

Exactly. They could have changed the license to AGPL and companies wouldn't touch the project with a ten-foot pole. And those who simply ignore the license? Why should they adhere to the new one? Instead, now people who stream emulated video games on RU-vid/Twitch and have some, ANY sort of channel monetization enabled now can't use it any more because that's a commercial use. Bravo!

Basically the Tldr of the video lol

@@qwesx Oh no! anyway cry me a river about those poor streamers get a life, get a job

@@qwesx this project probably isn't going to allow that, but in other cases - you can *always* try to acquire a license by reaching out to the developer. The only limitations are when there's no single copyright holder. But assuming that he wasn't against commercial use (he is) you could ask him for a special license, perhaps for money or for credit or for just personal commercial use.

@@qwesx I mean, the dev would have to prove the uploader was using a version of DuckStation from after the licence swap before he has a valid claim. Also, I might be wrong about this, but I believe RU-vid has the option for a copyright claimant to enable ads on a video where their copyrighted material is being used. If that's the case, the licence can get breached without the original uploader's consent. What a mess.

In a way it already was.

@@DarkusObscurius lets hope we see a fork soon - unlike nintendo i do not think this author can do jack-sh---t to get the fork taken down imo .

​@@breadmoth6443 You don't need to break the new terms. The changes that happened since the old license was removed are probably minimal, so it doesn't even matter. You can simply fork the code from before the license change and you're good.

I think github even says that by uploading stuff to github you automatically allow people to fork it

​@@frooastside Forking ≠ modifying. You can fork all you want. You can even distribute the official packages. But you cannot modify anything.

Except the one guy who changed the license in the first place is 90% of "the devs" on his own.

@@Poldovico But he is not allowed to change the license of the previous version committed version of Duckstation from GPLv3. What he did is legal and doesn't break the license, *if* he rewrote all of the code that did not comply with his new license. Previous version releases can still be freely forked, and he cannot stop you from using those versions or modifying them and making your own projects. As long as someone is willing to become deeply familiar with the duckstation codebase and then fork it, Stenzek can run off with his proprietary version and sit in a corner while everyone else uses DuckStation2 or whatever the FOSS community rebrands it as.

@@orangejuche in theory yes. In practice, when the one dev holding a project up stops doing that, the project dies.

​@@orangejuche there arent many people in the world who care enough to maintain a console emulator. project's probably gonna die if he leaves

@@trustytrojan There aren't many people right now, sure. But you can't say there won't be any in the future, either. This is one of many cycles to come and pass by. Let this project rest and another one take over. PS1 emulation is mostly a solved problem anyway, so if you ask me, everyone could use a little break before trying to improve it again.

Stenzek chose to be an enemy of FOSS. Then so be it.

Shareware is it's own weird distinction but it's not too far off

@@RogueRen how is it shareware?.. It's freeware by the *ware definition. Open source freeware. Freeware projects are often freeware only for non-commercial usage, which is how they (hope) to pay for themselves. If you're a commercial company making money using a freeware product, you fund its development for regular users.

@@softwarelivre2389 Dude don't walk that route. Try to get Stenzek perspective on this. He poured thousands of hours on duckstation and the rewrite of PCSX2, and over the years he got harassed and screw over multiple times for what? Giving out an immense and very high end piece of work for free.

Duckstation was already compatible with something like 99.99% of PSX games, almost all of the recent commits were localization/UI changes, the core functionality was already polished to the point of imperceptibility. Forking it from a previous version would not remove any appreciable functionality, and there's very little work that needs to be done to the code beyond adding even more languages to the menus, and perhaps ensuring an OS update doesn't somehow break functionality, but this can be solved in the modern day by giving duckstation its own happy little flatpak type container.

Given the low interest from other developers in the past, don't expect updates on any forks, which might be fine.

other question is that has the dev bought Qt Commercial License also, if not he can't do this either because Qt free version is GPL/LGPL only

I mean it's emulating PSone games. It's all basically done with only really weird fringe cases needing work.

BTW, please check the commits: A lot of them are just for deleting copyright or modifying definition names, just to delete pcsx2 references :D

he did mention he rewrote a lot of code, but neither you or me care enough to check the commit history further than what you said in your comment, right?

@@generallyunimportant Fuck I Mean, as someone who uses both, that is the flimsiest excuse. What, you take the GPL code and literal UI, then make it shareware because you 'changed it'? Uhm, source branch needed? Because maybe I want to fork the work PCSX2 did before you touched it just to go clean slate?? I am not taking your word for it! Give me the date and I will fork it myself! (Probably not I am lazy and I am making my own game but still, that should demonstrate the level of 'out of your way' you have to both believe/accept his words at face value)

If I'm not wrong, he made both the UI and Vulcan renderer in both Duck station *and* PCSX2. Not defending him, he's had these spats for a few years, just, bringing this up.

@@twenty-fifth420 i really should've highlighted the "i don't care enough to verify his statements" part of the comment huh or maybe it's misunderstood because it sounds ironic(/making fun of? idfk) if you read it more than for two seconds? oh well.

A) copyright claims in the US allow recovery of attorney's fees for the winner B) There are non-profits that exists explicitly to defend and enforce open source licenses So possibly yes, provided whoever's violating the license has deep enough pockets to be collectible. There's a reason companies roll over so quick when they realize they dun goofed.

not sure if it is shareware , it can be freeware - epesxe is freeware - just closed source which is a shame.

Because you can't retroactively revoke the GPL. Anyone with the previous build can use its original license, spread it, and then you tend to loose your community to a fork. Its a terrible idea as a dev.

they can't remove access to what they already GPLed but in the FOSS world this kind of rugpull is sadly common

thats because when you do that, and your project is like... relevant... people will fork the older version if enough people care about your project, and you don't allow contributing to your own project, the fork will most likely win.... ~~if not enough people care about your project, the existing and potential people will most likely be scared off by your new license and just stop using your project~~ (this is wrong)

It's like being a chef and cooking for free for a homeless shelter in your spare time, and then realizing your food is being sold at restaurants and other people get the profits instead of yourself. The recoil is kinda understandable. For some reason there's an expectation for devs to work for free that doesn't exist for other careers

Sort of like creating your software for free (a gift to the world) and then finding out Microsoft has made a billion dollars selling your software. I guess you should send him some lube as a gift?

And disallowing forks is like nuking your house because there are rats in it. Sure it works, but you also destroy a lot of other things, most of which didn't hurt you directly. I can understand the Non-Commercial, sure, but really not the ND (in principle, ofc irl any fork would just remove the commercial again, and the devs get shafted anyhow, but i think redis's license is a good starting point to change that. It shouldn't have received the amount of backlash it got)

@@4crafters597 no, it's like disallowing people from selling the food you make for free. It's excercising a form of control over how your work is used for it to be worth for you to make that work. If you're working for the emotional benefit of feeding the poor, you'd want to ensure that the food can't be sold for you to get your "payment" in the form of emotional satisfaction. He doesn't prevent anyone from using his emulator, doesn't make it close source. So he isn't nuking anything and doesn't hurt people

​@@NJ-wb1czImagine if RMS & TBL made their works proprietary Yeah, he ain't cut out for FOSS

GPL is a terrible license.

Because knowing people steal your work and don't even credit you is the worst feeling. Better to be single than have a cheating husband.

@@doyouwantsli9680 It's not stealing, it's copyright infringment, it's a completely different thing. Also, him just changing the license won't stop companies from using the project illegally without a care in the world: they were already breaking the license, of course they would just break another one, thinking they won't is beyond naivety. The one thing he's actually doing is preventing packagers to redistribute it under the light of the sun.

@@doyouwantsli9680 that's bullshit. The entire point of GPL is share and sharealike. The dev is a whiney bitch and should leave the internet forever.

Got caught by the good ol' 4-byte alignment issue, eh? I recommend No$PSX for any debugging anyway. And always test on real HW wherever possible!

@@xan1242 see all the stuff that had to do with the executable was handled by a different team member (the game stores some text inside the executable for some reason, the names of attacks, characters, dialogue choices and text seen during battle) I was just doing stuff for the main text stored inside the BINS The game also has the half the game "cut out" One half is in english but the localisation is butchered beyond belief And the other half was never translated into English and is just left on the disc with a couple flags set to stop you accessing it My job was just to fix up the English text and make it fit with the rest of the series, someone else on the team rushed shit and broke tons of stuff

Just so you know that is pretty typical even in something like Dolphin. That's a failure on your team members part (an easy mistake to make if new to asm). Emulators purposely don't check alignment because of the performance cost to do so. Thankfully its very easy to fix your codes, just ensure any memory access is 4 byte aligned.

You should report these problems, it'll most likely never get fixed if you don't

ePSXe for me. No idea if the project is still going but that's what I used back in the day.

@@gigaherz_ No Linux release and is also absolutely proprietary. I’m waiting for a DuckStation fork containing the code that was licensed under GPLv3 instead…

both of them suck compared to duckstation sadly.

@@doingitsidesways yes duckstation is far superior , and i think epsxe might be abandoned , sad that another project instead of being abandoned still manages to die off because the maintainer probably has a stick up their a--- and wants to go proprietary for some reason.

Bleem! and VGS here. They were doing the craziest sorcery, working on freaking 133Mhz single-core CPUs.

"Rules for thee, not for me"

groundhog day(year?) or, you know, funny premonition dreams :3

You might be remembering when he archived the project instead

then we fork the last good version and go without him.

BSD's and GNU/Hurd's wet dream.

@@gogereaver349 and if that fails we move to BSD

That's not how the kernel works

​@@AClockworkHellcatlmao

nixpkgs actually had an existential crisis about their potential mass GPL violations when this happened, lmao But yeah the "no packaging" clause sucks specifically for distros like NixOS, which depend on their own packaging to run applications at all

​@@mayredwood "existential crisis" is a strong way to put this. Nixpkgs is much better at handling licenses than the AUR, for example. And the supposed legal issues in this case are purely theoretical (in the sense that they haven't actually been put to the test in the court of law and nobody actually knows if repackaging is considered modification and if dynamic linking is derivative work or mere aggregation). So Nixpkgs aren't really breaking the GPL any more than most other distros.

Depending on their own packaging used to be the main reason I don't use NixOS. If I wanted that kind of relationship with my OS developers, I'd use Apple.

@@rightwingsafetysquad9872 I genuinely don't see the parallels you are drawing between nixpkgs and apple. To me they seem like polar opposites.

What crisis? Oh no, I have to use flatpak. Big deal.

theres also no reason to make the project _no longer_ open source, you might still get contributions and if you lose interest and abandon it people can carry it on.

@@a.lollipop I'm intrigued, I've seen this idea repeated almost word for word so many times that it seems like there's a source. Is there a particular person, like Louis Rossmann, who has popularized this particular wording?

People obsessively developing unique niche projects for free are often similarly obsessive about other things. It's not practical or reasonable to give away your effort like that, if he could easily step back and look at what he's doing, he would've moved on years ago If he wasn't insufferable, you wouldn't have had any of his projects, and the state of PS and PS2 emulation would've been completely different

@@NJ-wb1cz Not PS1. There were already good PS1 emus before DuckStation. ePSXe might be old, but still serviceable, and there's PCSX-redux, which is still maintained. I'm not aware Stenzek is part of that one (I might be wrong though), as to my knowledge, both PCSX and PCSX2 were started by Linuzappz. Also, CMIIW, but isn't Mednafen's PS1 emu their own? As in, not using any third party emus (I know they use VBA for GBA emu).

@@marioprawirosudiro7301 he's by far the primary contributor to PCSX2, and pcsx-redux is on the order of magintude less popular than duckstation. It`s kinda like saying, we don't need linux, we have freebsd. Maybe you don't, but without linux the state of unix-like operating systems would've been profoundly different. Maybe it would've been better, maybe worse, but definitely different

I've interacted with him a total of one time. He is an insufferable asshole. Ares as an emulator is creating their own PS1 emulator, and I'm excited to see how it proceeds going forward.

I mean, the reason that's even the case is because a lot of very stupid people happen to use the software he works on. A major example of that is that he left PCSX2 (and I can't confirm this, only he knows the reason why) partly because he backported the audio code from DuckStation to PCSX2. This had the side effect of removing a feature called Async Mix: basically, it makes audio voices (in the audio engine sense of the word, not actual "voices") play at real-time speed, regardless of the current speed of emulation. This had the side-effect of breaking some games that rely on accurate audio timing (like rhythm games, but non-music games could also be affected). The removal resulted in users, who were using Async Mix because their potato 2006 craptop couldn't run games at full speed, getting mad at the devs, since now the audio will only play to match emulation speed - hence, the audio now plays in slow-mo for them. They would make the excuse that "the game was running FINE before" (when actually, it was running in slow motion: they just didn't realise it because the "normal" audio was kinda tricking their brains.) I'm assuming Stenzek got threats because of that (far from the first time something like this has happened in emulation) and just quit the project. He even had a PR in the works, but it was closed because he deleted his PCSX2 fork outright, basically signalling a halt to any further involvement in the project. A new contributor moved this code into a new PR of their own, well within the bounds of the license, but it was shot down for personal reasons: Stenzek said he didn't want any of his code being reused (I'm too stupid to fully understand license stuff, but given PCSX2 is GPL 3.0, and Stenzek is considered the copyright holder of his own code, I _believe_ this is enforceable(?)) IANAL.

if he doesn't, it would seem then the dev is just a prick and would rather break the toys instead of letting an open version of duckstation to live on .

Duckstation became dead the moment it became proprietary. I'll never donate a dime to his project after this incident.

@@softwarelivre2389 thats just it about the authoer's own words - if he is too busy, why not just let someone else fork it or something? i don't understand the author's reasoning.

@@breadmoth6443 he doesn't need to allow anything. Anyone has the right to fork the code, as it is GPLv3. He is not allowed to release any proprietary version.

You don't have the right to deny someone from doing that. " All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. " so they can't prevent it. Anyone forking the GPL version is allowed to do so and has a legal right to do so.

Yeah, that is the weird part. It is no less "stealable" and given his past actions, nothing will happen to future violators of CC BY-NC-ND. In fact, he might have made it easier to violate the terms and win in court since CC isn't written for software and even they recommend not using it for that purpose.

Dev: *does not want code to be stolen for cash* Also Dev: *does everything in his power to make it so only those who are stealing it for cash are going to be the ones using it* Another case of "people with the technical skill to make a thing don't always know about how stuff outside the program work".

​@@lpfan4491same applies to PR-people

Just file a DMCA to repository if your code was stolen.

Nothing stops you from it, but it's not designed for that, and so more nuanced cases may be ambiguous.

Most CC licenses aren't designed for code and are often not suggested but technically you can apply any licence

lots of Minecraft mods use CC, but it's not recommended, due to CC licenses being designed for pictures or video, not programs.

At least from this video it sounds like he just doesn't want people making money off his work for some reason or another. Probably feels like he is being taken advantage of. He puts all this work in to essentially carry this project almost solo and then someone takes his work, contributes nothing, and makes money that should be his but isn't because he wanted to give to the community, not profit. Probably feels like the community around his emulator is being completely ungrateful in wanting to fork this and essentially kick him out of his own project and he would rather burn it down than let ingrates take his work and completely ignore his wishes. This is pure speculation and is just me trying to wrap my head around this situation though. While he is completely wrong, I can't deny that I would probably be at least a little frustrated if someone else was profiting off my work when I elected not to profit off of it myself.

@@Drazil100 Perhaps he should have read the provisions of the GPL which allow commercial redistribution and sale of the program, so long as the distributor/seller distributes the source code as well. What Arcade1Up did was a breach of the GPL, but they did rectify it and distribute their modified source code once they were called out on it as a GPL violation. If he was so uncomfortable with commercial redistribution of his code, he should have licensed it under a more restrictive license from the start.

@@orangejuche Let me be 100% clear here I am NOT defending the guy. Hey 100% broke his own license. I am only trying to understand what caused him to break his license rather than just straight up calling him a butthole and moving on. Something triggered him to do this and maybe there is a lesson in here or something that would make this less likely to happen. This guy is not the first FOSS developer to destroy their own project because they are tired of the community. Usually it happens because some project becomes a super necessary piece of software holding up a bunch of modern applications that have no clue the project is even a dependency. Large scale businesses end up relying on this software but nobody cares to even donate to allow the sole developer to justify maintaining the project and at some point they snap and nuke the project. What he did is completely unacceptable. I do NOT support him handling the situation the way he did... But there is a good chance his reason for doing so, while not an actual excuse, is better than we give him credit for.

Which is ironic because his project explicitly depends on several of his own forks of other FOSS projects to which he's gone out of his way to break API.

He's basically one of those snakes that takes advantage of FOSS​ communities's goodwill@@Drazil100

This one specifically is weird

@@BrodieRobertson People on Twitter argue is it a violation of the license by just compiling the code: you get a remix/derivative of the code after the process :)

It is similar to the BS that they pulled with Grayjay. They are effectively proprietary. Being able to see the source doesn't mean it is not proprietary. With enough money and signatures on contracts, you can get all sorts of closed-source code.

It still gives ultimate legal control to the copyright holder. The only difference to a proprietary license is that it happens to include a public license, specifically the most restricted one. At least it's an emulator, not a text editor, otherwise this license would be worse than any proprietary license.

well seems to me the author is not interested in preservation ... it is sad also that projects die - i would definitely love to contribute if i know how to code , but also an example of projects stagnating is zsnes - it was the best by far as a SNES emulator, but as far as i know still doesn't have an official 64-bit port , but snes9x does , but zsnes is far superior.

@@breadmoth6443 zsnes was already vastly inferior to other emus because the source code was full of hacks and written in x86 assembly. it was fast but its advantage ended right there.

Underrated comment. Yeah it will

You can just use QT under LGPL. LGPL allows commercial use. Go ask them about it and you get a lot of funny ambiguity and nonsense. The GPL and LGPL explicitly protect a user from additional licemse requirements. IANAL but I can read and that's what those licenses say.

you should watch the video before commenting

Like most GPL advocates, you seem to lack even a basic understanding of how licensing works.

@@dabrams84 he says he did, please watch before getting angry

​@BrodieRobertson He's not angry, he's lmao'ing

@@zerron2156 watch the video before lmao-ing lmao

​@@BrodieRobertsonexcept for the fact that 1) he still haven't rewritten some of the code that the contributors that disagree had written and 2) some are not even consulted about it.

Well not really. If something is public domain it means anyone can use it however they like. A large corporation can take it, develop it so that it's much better and release it under a closed source license. Now they effectively control that piece of software, since no person will be able to rewrite in their free time what the paid employees did. They will always be ahead.

copyleft >>> all

Not even close. Copyleft licences are a hack to ensure the public still has access and business/users that distribute or sell must contribute back. As Andrei says, closed applications have no such obligations.

@@orbatos public domain is the fate of everything, though, because licenses only apply while copyright is valid.

@@Poldovico In the US, that is lifetime + 75 years which for software is effectively forever.

like retro arch, i am not convinced by this project - it is trying to be an all encompassing emulator - i would rather just have one emulator , a playstation emulator that does it almost perfectly, rather than "a jack of all trades" that does everything but poorly.

@@breadmoth6443 retroarch is a libretro frontend, what?

​@@breadmoth6443 that's fair, but medafen is much more grounded than retroarch though (for example, mainly only one emulator per system). plus, the ps1 core isn't a fork

@@breadmoth6443 but what does Mednafen- or pcsx for that matter- do poorly? The Beetle-PSX core in Retroarch seems functionally identical to Duckstation.

@@breadmoth6443 medafen uses there own cores vs retroarch using a collection.

any software made mostly by one person can be re-licensed as they own the underlying copyright (will need to re-write the few parts made by others) so anything that isn't made by a large community can easily stop being OSS whenever. as for GPL see Linus Torvald's complaints about the ant-tivosiation clause and how that was introduced as an example of how the licenses themselves can go bad (note: personally I'd like an anti-tivoisation clause if it applies to the use-cases/industries currently exempted).

@@duven60 well you just confirmed that i cant trust any of the foss stuff now because be it one person, a small group of people or a big corporation they can just make it proprietary any day they want. If some of the participants are against it then all they need to do is to bribe these programmers so they "dont mind" anymore or just rewrite their parts of code if they are stubborn. The only exception is if the project have like thousands of participants and even then its probably possible to deal with it :(

I feel like I own the remake already

@@BrodieRobertson When i was young. My neighbor had PS1, and i saw Crash Bandicoot 1st time that time. In worms, he made fun of me and said "use this white flag! this chases away the flies!". xD

He did post resources in the description.

@@pip5528 retracted, though i guess it went past me when i first looked - perhaps how he formats things should change then .

@@pip5528 didn't link leah's blogpost though ,-,

@@breadmoth6443 Fair enough. It's in the middle of the description and of course lots of people don't read RU-vid descriptions in general let alone expand to read the rest.

@@pip5528 i did read but i admit i skimmed through - doesn't help my eyesight isn't the best -....even with glasses.

Pcsx?

@@swagmuffin9000 isn't that ancient and abandoned? ePSXe was the one I knew about.

@@Poldovico have no idea if it's abandoned, it's what i use tho. i use pcsx2 and rpcs3 for sony emulation.

How did he betray "the" community ? WHAT ? He's a skilled programmer who made Duckstation as a hobby, he has the right to do anything he want with it, including making it source-available/proprietary even if people don't like that, also, he owns project, most if not all the parts by other contributors has been rewritten by himself, he owes you NOTHING and I don't see how making it source-available/proprietary is betraying the community it's his project he does whatever he wants with it, I'm myself a emulator programmer and most of my stuff is proprietary, people complain every time about this and tell me I HAVE TO open source my things but I don't want to I write code for my own pleasure and I do not care about what people will say.

@@YannBOYERDev what have you worked on?

That's basically the point of it, it's explicitly not an open source licence so it's only about the rights of the dev

the perfect name for a future fork

That sounds like more of a problem with excessive length of copyright than with the licenses. I would support shrinking that back to about 20-25 years but we've yet to see what happens to OSS software when copyright expiry kicks in.

@@duven60 it could just become public domain. which functionally is the same as MIT. Except, of course, not all parts of a software project are authored at the same time, and while the whole "remove the contributions" angle works for GPL stuff, co-authorship is a thing in copyright law...

He's not interested in making money, in fact it actively interferes with making him money since he already has a job. People fail to understand that devs do this kind of stuff as a passion project and not everything has to generate an income. Making money from software is where a programmer's passion goes to die.

@@raiden24 Why did he change the license from GPL3 to the most restrictive CC one then?

If money were ever a factor, why would he not just open a Patreon or Kofi and leave the license completely untouched? There's absolutely no way he didn't consider that, so the idea that money drove him to do this is stupid. Especially so when you consider he left PCSX2. He's a PhD student so I'm sure if he needed a job he could get one, no problem.

its a good one with upscaling zbuffer correction and so on. ps1 games look great on it.

ePSXe was abandoned a decade ago and it has more than a few issues running more than a few games.

same never even heard of duckstation

What are you on about? The project doesn't even have a donation page! Software can be free as in beer without being free as in freedom.

​@@raiden24The fact that you are not even aware of how he singlehandedly made an entire drama over PCSX2, Retroarch, and AetherSX2 (this one with Patreon money involved) shows that you know nothing about the guy. He is undeniably a genius but no one involved with the development of these emulators (including veterans of the Dolphin team) likes the guy. Changing a license from GPL to this is pretty much signaling to a company like Sony or any other publisher that wants to sell PS1 games using his emulator as a wrapper, if they show him some decent amount of cash, he can change it to a full commercial license. I've seen this happen before with former FOSS developers, modders, and artists. It's a blessing that mednafen exists.

He’s pulling an ePSXe…

@@Orbitthemaster So tell me why Sony or any other publisher has never done this even though PS1 emulation has existed for over 25 years and Stenzek did not pursue any other forms of monetization. Also he had nothing to do with what happened to AetherSX2 at all. And RetroArch has had all kinds of drama before Stenzek even entered the picture, so that's far from "single-handedly."

@@escape209 The just used PCSX ReARMed for the Playstation Classic.

I saw the discussion about PCSX2 below and that is another one I may have used but it was at least 8 years ago if not more than 10.

epsxe has been deceased for quite some time and used an archaic plugin system. There's no reason you can't just use the previous release of duckstation, or compile its code from the commit previous to the license change, it will work just fine though your forked version won't get any more updates from Stenzek.