On Saturday 22 May 2004 09:46, Stephen Anthony wrote:
> I honestly don't know what the problems are. It seems to be
> obvious that there is bitterness, but I *really* don't know
> what it stems from.
Speaking as someone who releases nearly everything as GPL, I'd be
kinda bitter too if I suspected a developer with feet in both
the GPL and proprietary worlds had taken my stuff and not
released the source to the project he used it in. Especially in
a hard to prove "derivative works" case as this one would be,
given that the original code was x86 and AA is ARM.
Some of us will never be comfortable with attempts to monetize
our hobby on the mass market, and some, like John and yourself,
have more effort invested in the hobby than others. I don't
know whether John's reactions to the situation are justified or
not but they are certainly understandable. For many of us it's
just a hobby, and it's not worth it to try to enforce our
copyrights if they are abused. For the Glenns and Brads of the
community, though, I'd lay money either they or their business
partners would lay some legal smackdown if, say, one of us
managed to hack AA to play arbitrary ROM files and released it
as a GBA 2600 emulator.
I don't feel this is at all off-topic, no matter how annoying it
may be to the more pragmatic members of the list, because this
is the kind of issue that divides and even destroys communities
and it's best to deal with it in the open rather than in private
messages, emails and chat rooms. It has nothing to do with you,
Stephen, but you have unwittingly become the face of Stella by
refusing to let it languish and I think that's why John has
unfairly lashed out at you.
Frankly, even if Stella did just wrap all of z26's functionality,
I'd be pretty okay with it because while z26 is still the better
emulator, I'm more familiar with Stella and at least it'll give
you usage information when you're messing around with it rather
than having to type, say, less
/usr/sh[tab]/doc/z[tab]2[tab]/[tab]R[tab]M[tab][enter] and then
search for command line options in the readme every time you
can't figure out how to do something. None of which makes me
less sympathetic to what John is feeling.
Rob
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