"Respects Your Freedom" certification?

[commander-beef]

DosBox EX Ultimate - should be FOSS, Streak is probably violating the GPL by releasing a non-free fork of DosBox

Wouldn't it be enough for Cmdr Beef to release the DosBox portion of code to fulfill the GPL requirement? A seperate UI application (not using DosBox code) does not require the same license as a program it interacts with.

Sure, if his frontend is a separate program, he can choose whatever license he wants for it. But he still has to give the sources for his modifications (if any) to DosBox itself, and provide correct license information and pointers to the sources for the GPL'ed software he is distributing. Also, he does not mention the original authors and the license of DosBox itself, and he makes it look like the entire thing (frontend+main software) was written by him. He specifically asks people to donate money to him, while arguably the core component of the software package he is distributing was not written by him and is GPL'ed. That is behavior I frown upon.

I dont want to start flame war since you seems didnt read the description of dosbox ex. There was a statement that you should consider. 

Firstly: There are two separate apps. DosBox and GUI [which is my software and its closed source], that are not behaves as one app.

Secondly: info in my pnd: 

Why two versions? Because all new feats from Donators Edition was sugested/demanded from community, and i implemented them especially for community, Im finding it fair to pay small donation sum for product or new feature that was demanded previously by community.

go ask people why they want to donate, not because of dosbox itself but for this new GUI [and options that it provides] that helps a lot in configuring. Otherwise they will stick witn free version or even with pickle's port of dosbox. 

So, please stick with facts, not assumptions.. 

btw. i was happy not to join a discussion about RYF, since i dont see any point to be involved [as a OP Team] in this organisation that promotes more itself than real hardware and open-source. I would love to not be involved in any RYF conversation in the future. And please dont point my software as 'black sheep' or 'GPL Software Bastard'. 

 

[_wb_]

It's fine to charge money for software you wrote yourself. It's selling other people's GPL'ed software as if it were written by yourself that I frown upon. He should make it clearer that his contribution is just writing the front-end, not the emulator itself. Otherwise people will be donating money to him while they think they're supporting the authors of the emulator.

And yes, out of those 20 most downloaded PNDs, half are emulators (or 11 if you count ScummVM). Maybe we should look at the next 20 PNDs on the list.

It's not so surprising that emulators are high on the "top downloads" list - they typically have many releases (there's always something more to optimize or fix), and they give access to not just one piece of software, but an entire legacy platform. So that makes them quite desirable. Sure, most of those legacy platforms had a tradition of proprietary software (in particular, the officially released games on game consoles), but at least for platforms like C64, Amiga and DOS I would suspect that some people might also use emulators for non-proprietary software.

Whether people like FOSS for ideological or practical reasons was not the point. It's a bit artificial to even distinguish "ideological FOSS" and "FOSS for merely practical reasons" - most people are ideologically convinced of FOSS precisely because non-FOSS software is impractical for them (because one cannot port/modify/fix it). FOSS is very much a pragmatic ideology.

 

[commander-beef]

It's fine to charge money for software you wrote yourself. It's selling other people's GPL'ed software as if it were written by yourself that I frown upon. He should make it clearer that his contribution is just writing the front-end, not the emulator itself. Otherwise people will be donating money to him while they think they're supporting the authors of the emulator.

Another ideology. Do dosbox team gives dosbox to pandora? nope. The porters do that, otherwise there could be no dosbox on pandora.

Of course you shouldnt forget that gog.com is strictly financing / donating a dosbox team since some time. So why should anybody from pandora scene donate to dosbox instead of porter, or any other emu if emu-creators dont care about pandora version anyway? This should be considered as well. 

I could care more about pcsx rearmed and notaz than original authors, even if notaz forked pcsx rearmed from original pcsx. why? Because he is the main reason we have optimised version of pcsx on pandora.  

We could debate about ideology of religion , socialism, marxism,  open-source  and FSF or RYF... but after all, opinion is like ass. everyone has their own, and i see here 30 pages of pure nonsense, where one person want to persuade other person's opinion. And vice versa. 

 

[comradekingu]

commander-beef

That doesnt take away from the critique though, make it clear who is the author and who is the porter. What license is in effect for what part. Information is not the enemy here.

Topic:

I dont think playing retro games gives and credibility to closed source. People don't play games because they are closed source, but sometimes the opposite is true. If we put the finger firmly in the soil its evident that our repo is different in that it features a very large proportion of FOSS things. As with anything else, that is how we are different, and thats not something to discredit in the success of the pandora.

Whatever else there is, convenient sure. However downloading an emulator to play a game is no more telling than downloading firefox and browsing the web. There are plenty of pages which inhibit your freedom more than software for those systems, which isnt really the crux of closed source, because it isnt evil enough. And if you really want to make that point, isnt an emulator just enabling more freedom to whatever abilities you had? Playing analogue games on a pure digital monitor isnt easy, and playing homebrew on real metal, equally so.

As with how open can be good, but free is certain, Closed in this nature could mean the things we really want to get away from, i think that can be agreed upon is, DRM, spying, datamining, malware, etc. If the license to something for the case of argument could have been free, and is closed, it isn't so much the 100%-case problem.

 

[ZXDunny]

Whether people like FOSS for ideological or practical reasons was not the point. It's a bit artificial to even distinguish "ideological FOSS" and "FOSS for merely practical reasons" - most people are ideologically convinced of FOSS precisely because non-FOSS software is impractical for them (because one cannot port/modify/fix it). FOSS is very much a pragmatic ideology.

Oh, there's a distinction alright. When I'm looking around the web for an algorithm, I often frequent the FOSS sites (as well as web forums and suchlike) for code snippets which I then bake into a closed-source application. It's against the terms of the GPL, but who really gives a toss? It's not as if they can examine my source, is it?

D.

 

[b_o_b]

He should make it clearer that his contribution is just writing the front-end, not the emulator itself. Otherwise people will be donating money to him while they think they're supporting the authors of the emulator.

I agree, only made a slight adjustment in your post..

@CB Maybe you can adjust your description a bit and add a link to the dosbox site and to Pickle's version? Based on the comments from folks struggling setting up dosbox most will prefer the convenience of the EX version but it will create some additional clarity. No harm done.

 

[comradekingu]

Snippets of code arent copyrightable. Unless it has artistic value i should think.

Also i understand beef ported it, correct? Credit where credit is due.

 

[ZXDunny]

Snippets of code arent copyrightable. Unless it has artistic value i should think.

This is where it's getting into grey areas. Say I download the source (under GPL) for a project and then lift a procedure for say, dithering or somesuch. I rewrite that procedure into the language of my choosing. I then release my project as closed-source. What does the GPL say about that?

D.

 

[comradekingu]

You should know, you are the one doing it. But lets not stray OT. If we set our scopes to align with what everyone else is doing, it seems a somewhat mixed approach is best for all. Trisquel and such efforts havent got the steam debian does. And if we look elsewhere i feel the need to look away more than  anything.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

I personally believe the biggest commercial factor for the Pandora is playing closed source games on an emulator. The amount of work required to write an emulator is trivial compared to the huge amount of work required to create the entire back catalogue of emulated games we can enjoy. Note, writing an optimized emulator is obviously very hard and time consuming, and I don't want to take away from that, but given the choice of:


1. Have access to all closed source ROMs but no emulators


2. Have no ROMs but lots of emulators


I would much rather have 1. emulators can be written for Pandora, or existing emulators authors can be convinced to share their source with a porter or port themselves. If we had scenario 2 we simply wouldn't have any games.


Closed source commercial software really is the winner here.


We aren't all go to agree here, but I find it hard for most people not to see the importance of closed source software. At best most people will be ambivalent, if there is a open source sonic ROM that has been made from scratch, works identical to the original, comes with a lovely license, most people wouldn't care, they just want to play Sonic they don't care about the licensing. I say most and not all as some people here clearly do care very much, but they are in the minority both for the Pandora and in the world I believe.

 

[_wb_]

I agree that many people don't care about the license or even the legality of their copy of the game, as long as they get to play. But that does not at all logically entail that those people therefore prefer closed-source licenses over open-source ones.

 

[pmprog]

I agree that many people don't care about the license or even the legality of their copy of the game

Absolutely, so in the same respect, most people probably don't care about FOSS either. Pretty much the only people who care about FOSS are porters who are looking for stuff to port, or the FOSS groupies. Everyone else just wants stuff to run/play.
Nobody would care if I closed the source to Sky Supreme (even if I left it freeware). Hell, the repo says 131 people downloaded it, and there wasn't a single rating or comment actually related to the game. People probably didn't even play it, the fact the code was released under MIT and CC licenses was irrelevant.

 

[comradekingu]

I will play it now because i think your game deserved better, and also because it was not closed source.

 

[Klumpen]

Nobody would care if I closed the source to Sky Supreme (even if I left it freeware). Hell, the repo says 131 people downloaded it, and there wasn't a single rating or comment actually related to the game. People probably didn't even play it, the fact the code was released under MIT and CC licenses was irrelevant.

I tried it after you uploaded it, but it does not work with my gfx-driver, as it seems.

 

[pmprog]

I tried it after you uploaded it, but it does not work with my gfx-driver, as it seems.

Did you update to the latest version where I'd removed the libs I wasn't supposed to have included?

 

[Klumpen]

Yes.

If I choose "free flight", I see a sky without anything,

if I choose "survival" I can fly a plane for some seconds until it crashes to desktop.

 

[pmprog]

Yes.

If I choose "free flight", I see a sky without anything,

if I choose "survival" I can fly a plane for some seconds until it crashes to desktop.

PM'd you so we can not derail this thread

 

[Grench]

You can also use emulators to play potentially open-source homebrew software for those devices. But I guess that's not how they usually get used.

Anyway, that's not the point. We're not talking about applications, we're talking about hardware and the OS that ships with it by default. It's about the platform itself, not about the license of all possible software packages that you can install on it. Of course some people are mostly interested in playing proprietary closed-source games (roms or binaries). Maybe that's even the majority of the Pandora users, I wouldn't know. That doesn't matter for the RYF certification: of course you can choose to install and run proprietary software on an open platform, that's the whole point: you can do what you want. Part of being able to do what you want is having full control over the device, and for that you need firmware that is FOSS - with proprietary firmware, it is impossible to get full control over your device.

...

You're ignoring the real issues. Again.

If the FSF/RYF was 100% restricted to ONLY cover the device and software installed at shipping, then it wouldn't be much of an issue. It is the FSF/RYF requirements BEYOND those that become the points of contention.

You have acknowledged that using closed-source games (roms or binaries) IS a primary purpose of this device.

FSF/RYF certification restricts speech regarding software recommendations, packaging, marketing and even commentary of the device manufacturer to -only- 100% free software. This is noted, repeatedly, on their RYF requirements page of the FSF website.

The video of Sonic (and many others) being played on the device, on the front page of the device website, IS a recommendation by the manufacturer for non-free software that could/should be used in conjunction with the device.

In theory, if you take their RYF requirements at face value, they would restrict ED from being able to acknowledge that the device can run ROMs - or set up a booth at a trade show to let passersby play a Pandora running ROMs.

I'm not opposed to making the device, as it ships, 100% FOSS. I am opposed to making the packaging, advertising, interviews, depots, etc. all conform to the whims of some 3rd party self proclaimed standards organization.

The FSF/RYF certification badge is simply not worth the effort and the sacrifice of real freedoms.

 

[_wb_]

You are once again bombarding your speculation and imaginative interpretation to the status of established fact.

 

[b_o_b]

Roms are a separate entity. They are indeed closed source but that doesn't really matter. The program that executes the roms - the emulator - is usually open source and you can be pretty sure the emulator will not be able to execute malicious code. That is my main reason for advocating and using free software. I just don't trust closed source software. 

Firmware and all pre-installed software should be free software. With or without certificate