Comment on RetroDECK - Status update 2023-09
any1th3r3@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
As the RetroDECK team, we are deeply concerned by the rumors about how others have handled their dependencies and their relationship with those developers.
I haven’t been following up with the Emulation scene on Steam Deck for a while, what is this in reference to?
warmaster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think it had to do with EmuDeck. IIRC they put their Windows build behind a paywall, effectively selling other people’s work without consent.
julianwgs@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Free software is not about free of charge, but about freedom. If you publish open source software under a license which allows commercial use or selling the software, you have given consent. If you don‘t like that, change the license. (Users will still be able to use the software for free if they choose to compile it themself, because the source code is available.
Redhat does exactly what you are describing: Packageing open source software into a paid Linux distribution and I would say they had an immense net positive effect on Linux doing this. I believe that this the point. Don‘t be an asshole. If you partly profit of someone else open source software, give them money, bug reports, bug fixes, recognition, etc. Be part of the community.
warmaster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
IIRC They are not complying with some licenses of the software they are redistributing, IDK. I do not have an opinion on it because I’m not well informed about their exact actions, I’m just repeating what I can remember from RetroDeck’s Discord.
lazorne@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
We don’t want to comment to much on this issue. But this we can refute, we don’t believe that any licenses have been broken or illegality have taken place. The discord did get a flood of users that screamed fowl. This has never been proven to be true so far as we know. julianwgs comment above is more inline on from what we understand from all those that have been affected.
We as a project can not speak for others, but we can speak for us on what our moral compass is: Hence the statement above.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 months ago
Oof that’s shitty, will probably go with retro deck.
The entire premise is slimy. You’re running games, that you didn’t build or get to take any credit on, on an emulator they weren’t meant to run on that you also didn’t build, and then you’re charging for your skin for that.
Personally it sounds like an amazing way to get slapped with a huge lawsuit from studios, because it’s not crazy to think they’re profiting from their games at that point. Everything else is in the happy legal grey area because no one is collecting any money