Diseased Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[RetroCrab]

Is there even really an emulator scene for OG xbox and 360? The emulators I remember looking into were very low on the usability scale compared to, say, Dolphin, and it always seemed like more of a lack of interest than a genuine hardware limitation.

The best you have for Xbox is Cxbx-Reloaded which is not great. Xenia is pretty decently good for Xbox 360. I don't know of anyone doing serious work on Xbox One.

 

[Shoggoth]

I didn't want to do too much speculating in my post, but I think something like that is definitely going on here. My take is that Juan is spiraling because he feels he is losing control of his life. First he loses his literal children to his ex-wife, then he loses his figurative child to the people who had to step up and take charge of the Void Linux project while he was gone. I'm sure you're aware of this, but for people who aren't, Void would not exist without Juan. It was created by him as a testing bed for the package manager he was developing: xbps. It says a lot about the quality of software this one guy built that an entire community formed around it and that said community was large and dedicated enough to continue his work in his absence. This ends up sucking for Juan because it means that Void has outgrown him; he can't treat it like his personal project anymore and push reckless commits to master because there are a lot of people who would be screwed over by him doing that. Despite being the creator, he just doesn't give the other Void people a reason to trust him, so he feels his baby has been taken away from him. That's why I said this whole thing is partly sad to watch, because you can tell this guy is using this situation to work through some personal issues.

Man, that sucks. It has the makings of a great tragedy. He loses his family, his project, his freaking github page. It seems like he might even be working with sensible people, but he just went loopy.
All of this exists on top of the tension between the "homesteader" types and "maintainers". The first always start to feel cramped when names and ids start getting used.

 

[Misaki Nakahara]

install gentoo

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

Man, that sucks. It has the makings of a great tragedy. He loses his family, his project, his freaking github page. It seems like he might even be working with sensible people, but he just went loopy.

His github page is still gone, so at this point it's likely that it's gone permanently. He does have a gitlab page now.

All of this exists on top of the tension between the "homesteader" types and "maintainers". The first always start to feel cramped when names and ids start getting used.

Could you elaborate on this, I'm not sure I understand.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Is there even really an emulator scene for OG xbox and 360? The emulators I remember looking into were very low on the usability scale compared to, say, Dolphin, and it always seemed like more of a lack of interest than a genuine hardware limitation.

Xbox emulation has come far. Xenia in particular is a huge emulator and it's likely going to be used by shmup players since MAME isn't exactly ideal for playing Cave CV1000 games in (slowdown isn't emulated, essential for playing these games). There's vastly more interest in Xenia than CXBX-Reloaded, aside from JSRF and a few other exclusives. A decade ago Xbox emulation was a sad joke worked on by maybe one or two people and 360 emulation was solely in the realm of fake "PLAY HALO 3 ON YOUR PC" videos.

Aaron Giles is right old chap, as was the founder Nicola Salmoria.

That makes so much sense actually. The most exceptional emudevs always seem to be working on Nintendo systems. Byuu for SNES, MooglyGuy for N64, Beware for GBC, Endrift for GBA, StapleButter for Nintendo DS, and entire teams full of troons for Gamecube, Wii, Switch and 3DS. I am trying to come up with counterpoints for Sony and Microsoft systems and I'm drawing a blank. Sega has some personalities, especially in the Dreamcast scene, but they're mostly just the regular kind of narcissist crazy.

You've just crushed my 20 year dream of a decent N64 emulator ever coming out, but I guess DOSbox is more of an exception to the rule here, that's reassuring. For PC-98 emulation, DOSbox-staging said they were going to merge that at some point. Hard system to get into without speaking moon runes but there's so many games for it, should be fun if we can get a decent emulator and some fan translations. FM Towns also seems really cool yet under appreciated, I think under the hood it's also an x86 computer.

Eh, I'd argue the biggest hurdle to n64 emulation is both the ZSNES problem (emulation is "good enough" for many) combined with plugin hell and the fact that it's a complex system in itself. I haven't seen MooglyGuy around the n64 scene, mostly around MAME helping to emulate weird crap and obscure computers. The closest thing I've seen to the n64 that he's been involved in as of late was when he emulated the SGI Indy (the computer the original devkits ran on) in MAME and promoted it to "working" status. This also gave him cred in the retro computing scene because emulating any SGI computer was seen as a benchmark in computer emulation due to the mythical status they had and the poor documentation of most models.

There will likely be a good n64 emulator if the homebrew scene for that platform ever gains some traction. There's already cheap chinese CIC clones on the market and these are used in bootleg n64 games. There hasn't been a big 5th gen homebrew scene but there's already homebrew SDKs for the Jag, PS1, and n64.

 

[Coolio55]

Pretty sad that Xbox emulation is still so far behind but despite it being an easy console to develop for (thanks to all the drivers) the hardware was an unholy mess under the hood. Possibly worse than N64.

For PC-98 emulation, DOSbox-staging said they were going to merge that at some point. Hard system to get into without speaking moon runes but there's so many games for it, should be fun if we can get a decent emulator and some fan translations. FM Towns also seems really cool yet under appreciated, I think under the hood it's also an x86 computer.

Pretty fucking surprised that out of all the emulators, PC-98 is one of the ones NOT ruined by trannies. They go crazy for that fucking thing!

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

The DOSBox situation is interesting, and certainly if they fail as hard in integrating community improvements as is suggested that sucks, but when you have people building a project that prides itself on running on a wide variety of systems then suggesting changes like SDL2 only or the use of new-fangled 21st century C++ features in a few tens of lines of code, both of which completely break that compatibility.. that's probably not going to fly. Regardless of the fact that 99% of DOSBox users are probably on Win7+ or a recent version Linux or Mac OS X.

You've just crushed my 20 year dream of a decent N64 emulator ever coming out,

Did you ever try mupen64? Haven't used it in years but there's a mupen64plus fork under active development. Crossplatform and always seemed to work.. alright.

 

[Shaka Brah]

The DOSBox situation is interesting, and certainly if they fail as hard in integrating community improvements as is suggested that sucks, but when you have people building a project that prides itself on running on a wide variety of systems then suggesting changes like SDL2 only or the use of new-fangled 21st century C++ features in a few tens of lines of code, both of which completely break that compatibility.. that's probably not going to fly. Regardless of the fact that 99% of DOSBox users are probably on Win7+ or a recent version Linux or Mac OS X.

Did you ever try mupen64? Haven't used it in years but there's a mupen64plus fork under active development. Crossplatform and always seemed to work.. alright.

Part of the problem is that DOSBox doesn't work that well without the changes people want to add. Not necessarily the modern programming ones, but major bugfixes and proper input mapping and drivers. On a wide variety of Linux distros mouse input is Grade A fucked for no real reason, because they refuse to merge the fix that would allow people to get direct input.

 

[RetroCrab]

Eh, I'd argue the biggest hurdle to n64 emulation is both the ZSNES problem (emulation is "good enough" for many) combined with plugin hell and the fact that it's a complex system in itself. I haven't seen MooglyGuy around the n64 scene, mostly around MAME helping to emulate weird crap and obscure computers. The closest thing I've seen to the n64 that he's been involved in as of late was when he emulated the SGI Indy (the computer the original devkits ran on) in MAME and promoted it to "working" status. This also gave him cred in the retro computing scene because emulating any SGI computer was seen as a benchmark in computer emulation due to the mythical status they had and the poor documentation of most models.

There will likely be a good n64 emulator if the homebrew scene for that platform ever gains some traction. There's already cheap chinese CIC clones on the market and these are used in bootleg n64 games. There hasn't been a big 5th gen homebrew scene but there's already homebrew SDKs for the Jag, PS1, and n64.

MooglyGuy was the beacon of hope in 2008. He wrote MAME's N64 RDP core, and was the first person to try and lowlevel emulate the graphics instead of relying on Voodoo Glide wrappers. I told you I've been waiting 20 years for this. Then he stopped working on it for a while, then I found out he was also a non-binary furfag autist (also with a split dick)

There's nothing lolworthy here for the farms but I'll link it anyway, http://web.archive.org/web/20090211163746/http://moogle-tech.com:80/blog/

Later on Cen64 seemed like the new promising emulator, written by a normal person. But then that project stagnated. So I'm back to waiting. I don't think it's gonna happen unless a massive autist takes interest in it and dedicates half his life to the system.

Did you ever try mupen64? Haven't used it in years but there's a mupen64plus fork under active development. Crossplatform and always seemed to work.. alright.

It's my current emulator of choice and it's just terrible. No GUI and plugin hell. You have to choose between the Ocarina of Time menu screen not rendering or having obvious polygon errors all over the gameplay. It dumps your save files into a hidden folder on your system. It doesn't emulate important things like the nonlinearity of the thumb stick. The sound is bad. The slowdowns are missing. You get the idea, it's barely improved since UltraHLE.

As @CIA Nigger said, N64 emulation is stuck in "good enough" for most people hell. Minor powerlevel, I'm into Nintendo nostalgia as well. These emudevs annoy me because their ridiculous behavior online reminds me of the traits I suppress. It's like they're a caricature of me, only they're also talented developers that I want to respect.

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

As an update to my previous posts, Juan has now re-licensed xbps under the BSD-3-clause license as opposed to the prior BSD-2-clause license (Link/Archive). The reason for this, according to a Reddit comment Juan made, is to prevent members of the Void Linux team from using the xbps name and to force them to re-name everything (Link/Archive). This is hilariously ineffective, since the extra clause in the BSD-3-clause license says the following:

> Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

The important words there are "endorse or promote." The Void Linux team doesn't have to do anything as a result of the re-license because they weren't promoting their software using the xbps name, they just mention it as a piece of software they're using. If anything, people hear of Void first then xbps, not the other way around.

 

[Shoggoth]

Could you elaborate on this, I'm not sure I understand.

When you start a new project on your own you're exploring new grounds or homesteading a new intellectual / productive space. You have no users so you can always release broken versions, you can experiment, and slowly, you bootstrap the ecology surrounding your project to a degree where people who like rough-sleeping less than you do find it interesting enough, and they start joining in on the cultivation process, vastly accelerating the development process, continually lowering the bar to entry for new participants.
This is both good and bad for the original creator. Good, because he sees the lands he developed prosper and plenty of users are enjoying them. Bad because for them, it stops being fun. Suddenly there are users, responsibilities, community tensions. You aren't just a guy working alone. What you change affects others. This breeds resentment towards the johnny-come-latelys until with some, much, or no drama, some of the original people, maybe even the original developer, leave, to start new projects without people to gather around their elbows. Happens a lot with programming languages projects and projects which explode in popularity (actix?)

 

[RetroCrab]

This is both good and bad for the original creator. Good, because he sees the lands he developed prosper and plenty of users are enjoying them. Bad because for them, it stops being fun. Suddenly there are users, responsibilities, community tensions. You aren't just a guy working alone. What you change affects others. This breeds resentment towards the johnny-come-latelys until with some, much, or no drama, some of the original people, maybe even the original developer, leave, to start new projects without people to gather around their elbows. Happens a lot with programming languages projects and projects which explode in popularity (actix?)

People (autists) want the asspats that come with releasing free and open-source software, but don't actually understand or care for the reality of it: that anyone can fork your work and change it however you like, and that anyone can sell your code and make money on it that they won't share with you. Generally speaking this won't happen so long as the original developer stays working on their project and meets everyone's needs. But this can rarely go on forever. But this is just how it is. If you don't have free and open-source code, other people aren't going to contribute to your project to help it grow in the early stages. Why would they want to help you profit? It works both ways.

If Juan released xbps as a closed-source tool, nobody would have ever cared that it existed at all. He got himself involved in a community that does not exist to stroke his ego (even though that happens sometimes because people are generally nice), and then chimped out when the asspats stopped coming in. He's now trying to take his ball and go home, but it's too late. No matter how he changes his license now, the community has outgrown him, kicked him out of his own project, and will continue on with the 2-BSD license he can't ever revoke.

 

[Isam]

> Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

The important words there are "endorse or promote." The Void Linux team doesn't have to do anything as a result of the re-license because they weren't promoting their software using the xbps name, they just mention it as a piece of software they're using. If anything, people hear of Void first then xbps, not the other way around.

But BSD3 doesn't mention the software name (xbps), only the copyright holder's name (Juan) and those of its contributors. Am I wrong in this assessment? It seems to me that they could (though why would they) use the xbps name to promote Void Linux, but not Juan's name (again, why would they).

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

When you start a new project on your own you're exploring new grounds or homesteading a new intellectual / productive space. You have no users so you can always release broken versions, you can experiment, and slowly, you bootstrap the ecology surrounding your project to a degree where people who like rough-sleeping less than you do find it interesting enough, and they start joining in on the cultivation process, vastly accelerating the development process, continually lowering the bar to entry for new participants.
This is both good and bad for the original creator. Good, because he sees the lands he developed prosper and plenty of users are enjoying them. Bad because for them, it stops being fun. Suddenly there are users, responsibilities, community tensions. You aren't just a guy working alone. What you change affects others. This breeds resentment towards the johnny-come-latelys until with some, much, or no drama, some of the original people, maybe even the original developer, leave, to start new projects without people to gather around their elbows. Happens a lot with programming languages projects and projects which explode in popularity (actix?)

I'm not sure if you intended this, but you make it seem like this is a bad thing. If anything though, this seems like a positive and necessary step in the maturation process of a piece of open source software. If the team behind an open source project can't accommodate new users, then the team deserves to change or the project deserves to die. In both of the immediate examples, there are benefits that come with the original developer leaving. In the case of xbps, other Void Linux developers wanted to add features but couldn't because they were afraid of upsetting Juan. In the case of actix, the original code was basically false advertising because the safety guarantees provided by Rust were being undercut by all the unsafe blocks the original developer used.

But BSD3 doesn't mention the software name (xbps), only the copyright holder's name (Juan) and those of its contributors. Am I wrong in this assessment? It seems to me that they could (though why would they) use the xbps name to promote Void Linux, but not Juan's name (again, why would they).

I'm not a lawyer, so take what I say about licenses with a grain of salt. That said, the way I always understood the difference between BSD-2 and BSD-3 is that BSD-3 prevents you from saying something like, "The XBPS project and its developers endorse this project." You could be right that it only prevents them from using Juan's name in advertisement, which would make the license change even more hilariously ineffective.

 

[awoo]

that anyone can fork your work and change it however you like, and that anyone can sell your code and make money on it that they won't share with you

This depends heavily on your license. My understanding is that under GPL, any distribution must come with full source code and same license. There are even Creative Commons licenses that forbid commercial use and/or disallow any derivatives (they are not free software any more).

 

[Vecr]

This depends heavily on your license. My understanding is that under GPL, any distribution must come with full source code and same license. There are even Creative Commons licenses that forbid commercial use and/or disallow any derivatives (they are not free software any more).

The GPL allows selling binaries, but you must provide the source code on request, and it's recommended to provide it along with the binary, or put it on the Internet somewhere.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

@RetroCrab's avatar makes me realize that RetroArch itself probably contains the work of a whole bunch of lolcows, I've never looked into that community to see the autistic sperging that probably exists especially over what liberto cores are authorized (lol, for example, at how many forks of byuu's work are in those)

Is there even really an emulator scene for OG xbox and 360? The emulators I remember looking into were very low on the usability scale compared to, say, Dolphin, and it always seemed like more of a lack of interest than a genuine hardware limitation.

It's arguably on the Xbox platform itself mostly, internally at Microsoft.

There was a rumor that they dumped some code on the Xenia and CXBX-Reloaded that led to some sudden leaps in compatibility and fixed some long standing problems. Obviously nobody is talking freely but the way I saw it mentioned a few places was basically when Microsoft figured out some emulation stuff on the Xbox One, few months later someone dumped some code on the emulator groups, suddenly a bunch of games were now running (albeit not well, let alone perfectly) that never ran before and just happened to be games that suddenly were compatible on the Xbox One itself.

Wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft wants Windows compatibility to be part of their Xbox platform and is using the emulators to gain ground there. Also wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has dumped code on people/projects just to get them to work better.

 

[RetroCrab]

This depends heavily on your license. My understanding is that under GPL, any distribution must come with full source code and same license. There are even Creative Commons licenses that forbid commercial use and/or disallow any derivatives (they are not free software any more).

There's tons of emuscene sperging about Chinese emuboxes. They usually release the source code but it takes the devs by surprise that a company can sell their work without paying them. This is not unique to emulation of course.

Having the source code doesn't do you much good. Especially if it's GPL 2.0 and you get TiVo'd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

@RetroCrab's avatar makes me realize that RetroArch itself probably contains the work of a whole bunch of lolcows, I've never looked into that community to see the autistic sperging that probably exists especially over what liberto cores are authorized (lol, for example, at how many forks of byuu's work are in those)

@CIA Nigger summed it well enough, the autism is centered around Nintendo emulation. And I guess DOS emulation too since both DOSbox and PCem are lead by trannies.

Squarepusher / TwinAphex / Daniel de Matteis is my personal favorite lolcow so I can elaborate here.

Byuu complained about a fork in libretro called bsnes-mercury that added a bunch of crude hacks, but he never said it wasn't authorized. Eventually he made up with Squarepusher and he maintained an official bsnes port: https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/tree/master/bsnes/target-libretro

Ryphecha complained about a fork in libretro of Mednafen PSX that added a hardware renderer and a bunch of crude hacks, and demanded Squarepusher change the name. So that's why Mednafen in Retroarch is called Beetle now.

skmp complained about a fork in libretro of reicast and this lead to Daniel e-mailing skmp's boss at nVidia trying to get him fired:

r/EmuDev - Let's aim for a healthier emudev community. We don't trust TwinAphex to run libretro/RA anymore.

51 votes and 25 comments so far on Reddit

www.reddit.com

Almost all drama in emudev is centered around Retroarch these days. Here is a comprehensive resource:

https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/

 

[RetroCrab]

New emuscene drama for your perusal.

https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/issues/398 (http://archive.is/f1Bls)

Recently there's been a bug tester reporting issues he finds to Stenzek, who is the author of the PS1 emulator DuckStation.
The project is a total mess and has hundreds of broken games, and was caught copying large portions of the Mednafen PS1 emulator but breaking things in the process.
The beta tester kurayami6 has been meticulously documenting these issues to help out the project developer.
This is the kind of stuff companies pay thousands of dollars a month to QA testers for, and kurayami6 is doing it all for free and very professionally on GitHub.

Stenzek has been reading 4chan and having a total chimpout meltdown over people making fun of his broken code, and has become convinced this poor beta tester is behind the 4chan posts. The beta tester denies the baseless allegations.

Enjoy the multi-paragraph salt about how much he "doesn't care, honest".

You heard the man. Archived here before he DFEs it.

Open source, just don't point out all the problems with it or that's harassment.

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

New emuscene drama for your perusal.

https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/issues/398 (http://archive.li/f1Bls)

Recently there's been a bug tester reporting issues he finds to Stenzek, who is the author of the PS1 emulator DuckStation.
The project is a total mess and has hundreds of broken games, and was caught copying large portions of the Mednafen PS1 emulator but breaking things in the process.
The beta tester kurayami6 has been meticulously documenting these issues to help out the project developer.
This is the kind of stuff companies pay thousands of dollars a month to QA testers for, and kurayami6 is doing it all for free and very professionally on GitHub.

Stenzek has been reading 4chan and having a total chimpout meltdown over people making fun of his broken code, and has become convinced this poor beta tester is behind the 4chan posts. The beta tester denies the baseless allegations.

Enjoy the multi-paragraph salt about how much he "doesn't care, honest".

View attachment 1276510 View attachment 1276511 View attachment 1276512

View attachment 1276519
You heard the man. Archived here before he DFEs it.

Open source, just don't point out all the problems with it or that's harassment.

You weren't kidding about kurayami being meticulous, look how many issues he's filed (Link/Archive). As of writing this 98 issues are open and 138 are closed. Most open source devs would kill to have a beta tester this dedicated.