WinterMute and censoring of people trying to help other people

>And yet, 99% of the time they left the scene, letting their homebrew to rot. If someone wanted to do a simple change that has more characters than the old one (for example, apparently (I don't speak dutch so I have no idea if this is true. I'm basing myself off Google Translate), Dutch words are, like, 2x the amount of characters than english words), they have to redo everything?

Yes.

Fork their project, update it then translate it or do whatever you need to do. It's not hard, takes an hour at most and you could even rekindle general interest in the project with other people.

Often the hardest thing when programming is thinking up the idea, not putting it into action.

Fork their project, update it then translate it or do whatever you need to do. It's not hard, takes an hour at most and you could even rekindle general interest in the project with other people.

Click to expand...

Is that really an approach you want to encourage rather than have people come in, tweak a few variables/strings, press recompile and carry on with life? Seems rather contrary to notions underpinning open source development. It is not like there are even any security issues here for most people.

>Is that really an approach you want to encourage rather than have people come in, tweak a few variables/strings, press recompile and carry on with life? Seems rather contrary to notions underpinning open source development. It is not like there are even any security issues here for most people.

Yes. Keeping software up-to-date with dependencies is important.

"Yes. Keeping software up-to-date with dependencies is important."

If we are writing an OS, drivers, office suite, web browser or similar then sure. I can't see the value in having some would be fan of console homebrew have to figure out the differences between v low 10s era toolchain vs late stage/current stuff (and the differences are considerable) if their goal is tweak a few variables (how many times have we seen something change drastically in nature with a few extra lives, less damage, more damage...), translate a few strings, change a loader directory if some dev stuffed it onto the root. Stands in rather stark contrast to goals of opening up console development for anybody which cares to give it a punt, and making life easier for those that do.

If they want to lose it from their sites then so be it, plenty of people drop support for legacy stuff. Dubiously claiming trademark protection, issuing notices on said dubious basis often causing chain events, claiming nonsense about security (I will have to run it through a URL capturer one day to see what goes and if I can then issue a potential firewall blacklist if it is so very dangerous), claiming stuff about lost source (which most licenses have provisions for) but not stating what elements are the troublesome ones (this despite writing masses later in the discussion threads) and even then them not being required to do anything about it if it is indeed third parties. All that really rubs me the wrong way and seems contrary to that which the homebrew scenes have generally been about.

Edit. That said the key parts are the libraries (which are text and thus source included), the build scripts, a good chunk of the various GNU development projects, and maybe some of the conversion scripts (which are probably all but identical to current stuff). Might have to see about finally making that somewhat dkp compatible setup. Going to have to figure out which projects or versions are best candidates for first iterations there.

Keeping software up to date with dependencies IS important. IMHO, it's NOT more important than alienating your userbase though. It's really quite simple, someone asks a question, first question that gets bounced to them is "what version is x dependency"? If it's not the latest, it's a simple response of "sorry, it's unsupported, you're on your own". Trying to scrub old versions from the net is honestly a d**k move, and as far as I know, unprecidented in the open source community. Heck, even most commercial software doesn't go to that extreme, but rather they go the route of saying "you're running an unsupported version, please update" but still allow you to use it. Some commercial software and pretty much every open source software I can think of OTHER than devKitPro even supply older versions to the users (shocking, I know...) with the stipulation (either stated or implied) that it's not supported, because guess what? Sometimes people have stuff that just straight up doesn't work with the newer version, and as opposed to sinking hours into sorting out what dependency broke, it's often easier to use an old version and make the changes, then sort out updating it to a newer tool chain later, especially with software that can't guarantee 100% backwards compatibility.

dubbz82 said:

Trying to scrub old versions from the net is honestly a d**k move, and as far as I know, unprecidented in the open source community

Click to expand...

I have seen a few occasions where people seek to have the most up to date version be the main one available everywhere, quite aggressively at that (a few people doing otherwise open source game specific ROM hacking tools even) but they were not the same use case at all, and try to redirect all traffic to their sites. Sometimes it was to dodge adware and support issues, other times control.
Oldversion.com and oldapps.com had a few tangles with some people in the past as well. A bit related but there have also been a few cases where some open source thing bruised some company's ego and free time project is not terribly good at funding full time lawyer so buckled under a C&D.

That said, and as mentioned, I do view it as contrary to most of the thoughts, mindsets, aims and the like that I tend to associate with open source development*, and particularly dubious in this case (even without the "my nonexistent trademarks", "it could be bad security" and "an unknown part of it has lost the source code"). Also the above stuff is very much the exception here.

*hands up anybody who would not expect "ability to make a legacy version work again if you need it for a project" is not one of the main selling points on the open source notion.