The creator of the popular PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, known as stenzek, has made significant changes to the project's licensing, causing controversy in the emulation community. Originally open-source under the General Public License, DuckStation's license was changed first to PolyFormStrict License and then to CC-BY-NC-ND. These changes prohibit commercial use and derivatives of the emulator, including packaging it for distribution.Stenzek explained that the license changes were made to deter parties who had violated the previous license by not attributing the work and stripping copyright information. He also mentioned that preventing packagers from distributing modified versions was a 'beneficial side-effect' due
Not what I am arguing, but we do have two issues: 1) naming/branding for these types of licenses 2) FOSS banshees acting like these licenses aren’t acceptable & the whole idea is binary good or evil
As long as we don’t call them free, libre, or open source I don’t care. We shouldn’t make the terminology any more confusing for those.
There’s limited vocab to choose from & source available isn’t an appealing one
Yeah, it definitely is more appealing from a marketing perspective.
I do understand why some projects might wanna use the term, it’s to their advantage to be associated with “open source” even if the source code itself has a proprietary license.
The problem is that then it makes it harder / more confusing to check for actually openly licensed code, since then it’s not clear what term to use. Already “free software” can be confused with “free as in free beer”.
It doesn’t really roll off the tongue, I get it, but it’s the best and most widely used term for software whose source is available to view but not modify and/or redistribute.