I have issues with even Dolphin's donations. Basically it boils down to this:
* Biggest issue: Users have no guarantee that the money will be used the way you say it is. It is very easy for the guy running the donations to just scrape some/all of it for whatever they want or something like the 3ds decap fiasco to happen again.
* Mixing money with emulators is very shady in my opinion. You can say whatever you want, but 99% of your users will be using it for piracy and you are making money off of it. (Obviously not at the moment for Citra, but as soon as commercial games become playable they will become the majority of the use cases.) Note that this isn't so much a legal issue but a moral one.
* It can create weird scenarios for the project. Who decides what to buy with the money? Who gets the purchased resources? What happens if you get more money that you need? Or not enough to buy the one piece of hardware you need? With a big distributed project with many contributors these can become issues.
* Paying people for what is essentially their hobbyist project is silly in my opinion. I sometimes do console homebrew stuff, and I buy all the games/hardware I need myself, because it's my hobby. I have a job that pays for it and I don't expect other people to pay for it.
Again these are just my opinions.
Hi,
Thanks for explaining your concerns in such an elaborated way. Now, most of these really are a matter of trust, and I don't think I can really convince you of an opposite view with a plain answer on gbatemp. Regardless, I would like to give an answer for the public to make an opinion of themselves:
* Indeed, users have no guarantee whatsoever that we will spend their donations on what we say. However, I think we have delivered more than enough evidence so far that we *are* making progress on our emulator. Additionally, the reasoning about 4.5 3DS consoles seems more than justifying for this whole thread. I also would like to mention that there's no comparison to the 3DS decap fiasco, because in this case the paypal account is actually owned by the Citra developers themselves. Also mind you, without bragging I should point out that I'm well-known for my work on Dolphin's GPU emulation core, so if anything that should give you a hint as to how trustworthy I am (and how trustworthy the people *I* trust are). Either way, indeed people have to put trust into us in advance, and other than what we already delivered we cannot give any further guarantees. As explained below, I very much encourage critical thinking, so you probably should do some research of your own before donating if you really want to know whether this thread is legit or not.
* In my opinion, there's still a huge difference in "making money off emulators" and "funding emulators". We don't seek to make any money for our own pocket, so all donations will go towards the things explained in the post above. Now if we for a minute assume that even you (ToadKing) believe us in this regard, I don't see how this in any way is morally wrong. What's more, I fail to see how you would see *funding emulator development* to be worse than emulator development to begin with. If all that you see in this is that it enables piracy (which would be quite the limited view IMO, because emulation is about more than piracy), then your conclusion should be that either of these have the same net result. So how exactly is funding worse, if ultimately no developer makes any net profit?
* Please don't overestimate a) the amount of donations we're getting b) the time span that this donation tracker is supposed to run at. That said, Dolphin's money pool seems to have done well in the past year. The key is proper communication with developers and transparency in general. If money is spent by general consensus rather than by some individual's decisions, there's little likelihood of conflicts. I think by explicitly saying that the majority will be spent towards 3DS consoles, we've made a very clear policy to begin with.
* Paying people for what's their hobbyist project indeed is arguably silly. However,
making people pay for their hobbyist project is actually quite ridiculous. This is why we try to accumulate some homebrew development platforms (aka 4.5 3DSs): Be able to equip developers with the hardware they need to have in order to reverse-engineer the 3DS's inner workings. That way, people will still spend their free time on development without getting paid for it. But at least they won't have to also spend their own money on development, though. In this context also please consider that some of us are still visiting school/university and hence have no stable income to spend on these things. That said, I personally belong to this group, yet already invested more than 200€ simply for being able to work on Citra. I think this more than enough euros paid from my own pocket for now.
