Originally Posted by Expohase

Takka didn't ever really break the GPL, he did release his source code (although sometimes it's only on the SVN, which can be really hard to pinpoint for a particular version since he keeps changing things). There's nothing illegal with what he's done, it was just pretty sorely against my wishes, and after I made it clear that I wanted him to stop forking without talking to me he asked if he could release one more that was just a translation modification, and out of compromise I told him yes. Instead he did all sorts of crap in a release and that really broke the.. beast of burden's back for me (what the hell, why is there a spam filter that turns that word into "moron"?). He changes things really haphazardly and releases things without enough testing.

I see his work like this: maybe 5% of his changes are actually beneficial (bug fixes or oversights, but sometimes he changes things that he just didn't understand in the first place, like VRAM mirroring), 15% are adding features that are very simple and I probably would have added eventually, 25% are adding features that I do not care to have in gpSP but now am basically obligated to put in there or people will complain, and the other 55% are just changing things subjectively, possibly to make it feel like it's more his work to him. Like changing the GUI, or changing extensions or locations, or even changing the formatting of the code. And it's these things that really annoy me. Another annoying thing he does is put in some kind of framework that he's adding for a new feature that does NOTHING, or doesn't work at all, then hype the hell out of it. He's been promising multiplayer support forever now, and has the binary do various wifi initialization things that just confuse people and give them false hope. I'm all but certain that he's doing this to generate attention and I don't like it at all.

It was of course my fault for making it GPL, even though from day 1 I practically begged people to not fork it without my permission they don't really give a damn, especially people who probably don't understand English all that well. So that's why I'm making it closed source. The people I trust to port it can still get the source from me (like zodttd). If you read my terms in Temper it's basically exactly the same as what I want to do with gpSP. I just have to make sure to improve it enough so that Takka doesn't start trying to compete with me, with my own source, because that'd really piss me off (but I bet he will anyway).

Open source is good for collaborative projects but just because someone makes something open doesn't mean that they want someone else to start working on it. Trying to merge in someone else's random changes to your code can be more effort than its worth, if they do anything useful in the first place. Unfortunately, very few people see it the way I do. They see GPL as giving you rights to do whatever you want with a program, no matter how impractical it is. The reason I made gpSP open source is so that other people could see how I did things (I actually spend a ton of time reading source code for other emulators, so this is really relevant to me.. I'd never fork one though), and if they think something should be changed they can call me on it. Also so people can port it; although I'd like to be informed of this as well, I've been generally accepting of the ports that have come up (iPod, a few to cell phones).

gpSP was actually a project of great personal significance to me (wrote it during a period of serious depression and isolation, basically as a desperate attempt to accomplish something useful) and I figured that people would respect my wishes when I asked them not to modify it, although it occurred to me that they might not. Sure enough, what I got was people saying "fuck you, you made it GPL so I can do what I want with it." Mistake acknowledged, lesson learned. I'm not putting another sole effort emulator under GPL again, and I'm not going to risk a "non-modifiable" license like byuu has done with BSNES (and has gotten slammed for, somehow)