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
Duckstation license choice of CC BY-NC-ND is dumb for software for a number of reason—wouldn’t argue that. But there are software licenses in a similar vein, inspired by CC NC but actually for, ya know, software, that do what they want without being fundamentally problematic—and these were the “such licenses” I was talking about the whole time & should be tested/trialed. I think you misunderstood my phrasing.
No modification is a bummer, but I could argue for in either direction more strongly a) some source you can modify but you can’t contribute (like Microsoft’s closed-off Language Server Protocol) which is different level of restriction that flies in the spirit of having a open license making ‘modification’ not open enough since you can’t really get all downstream implementations to support your fork or b) I would be happier being able to see the code such as the encryption used that would be better than nothing (like whatever Discord is trying to tell users it’s definitely-not-back-doored E2EE setup is… trust us). “ND” is better than nothing & imperfect, but it can be seen as a spectrum.