I wasn't aware of the GPL issues or that the Chinese group never bothered sharing the rest of their code. It throws a big wrench in development when someone gets a part of the emulator working but doesn't bother showing how. Understand that any insights you gain from using the Chinese builds are basically useless to development because they have no idea what changes were made to accomplish it.
I feel I should clarify this slightly more: I reported all GPL violations here, not only those links to baidu.
Clearly the origin of the entire problem is Citra itself which violates the GPL of other projects by not including a license text with the release. Nobody did care (or wasn't aware) because Citra was still only used by developers and a small community until recently (which doesn't make it any less wrong!).
However, it has had nightly builds for a some time now (~a year) and nobody ever bothered to check if we were following the license (which asks us to include the license + offer the source code, or Citra is not allowed to use the code it is using!). - It was just a slow transition from small Citra to the project it is now.
The license issue is *STILL* a problem with the nightly builds. - The problem is only going to get worse.
So why did I report it only now? Because:
1. this topic has been going downhill lately and it was obvious that this place would end up with only warez discussions and GPL violating builds of Citra with no other discussion, making this very questionable from a legal standpoint.
2. With so many unofficial builds and Pokemon news it's likely that bigger news outlets are going to notice it. If this spreads it's likely a GPL violating build of Citra will be hosted on various servers. If this is seen by people whose GPL license Citra currently violates this could mean trouble.
3. Also if the unofficial builds are good enough to play Pokemon there is less interest in getting new builds so these GPL violating builds will also stick around.
All of this is a toxic mix which could potentially hurt a project like Citra.
I do understand the backlash this has been getting though: Users don't care about Citra, they only care about playing Pokemon - even if that hurts Citra. Similar to how users care about emulating WiiU now to play certain games even if they know that CEMU hurts WiiU emulation in the long run.
A point which is also often brought up: I did not report the violations because we can't see what the people on baidu did.
First, they most likely didn't do anything special and second, I don't think they are bad people. I'm sure they'll try to contribute back sooner or later.
However, they still managed to widely spread GPL violating builds of Citra which is not okay and takes away our control. The situation is bad as it is. So at least unofficial builds should fix their license, even if the bureaucracy of Citra means the main project will take some time to fix the license stuff.
- That being said, I still would prefer to see their code though because large number of closed source builds will attract scammers which add trojans / viruses or botnet clients to builds and the users won't be able to notice that. If we don't have a source code to verify yourself that everything is fine you are ALWAYS at a security risk. It's obvious that virus infected builds of Citra would also hurt the project.
It's also a very exclusive (in a bad way) environment if they only provide builds for certain systems (say Windows, but not OSX) and results in shift in the hierarchy: the communitys control is taken away and you have to beg them for releases. Eventually this could result in exploitation by monetization or other means.
Let's get back on topic now though.
(I also recommend opening a seperate topic if you want to discuss building custom versions of Citra or just Pokemon stuff to not clutter up this thread. This is also certainly not the place to learn git or C++)