While users can be demanding, this reads like a very immature response. Going out of your way to block support and prohibit packaging, which you can let others do with 0 seconds of your time, is kinda rude.

Author may have been harassed for all I know, but this is still an emotional response. They could have just said “yeah I’m not supporting this at all, figure it out yourselves if you want to” rather than actively blocking Linux functionality/packaging, which is what this sounds like.

From his readme…

As per the terms of CC-BY-NC-ND, redistribution of unmodified releases and code is permitted. However, we would prefer if you linked to www.duckstation.org instead. Please note that pre-configured settings and packages are considered modifications.

That long list of letters…

CC-BY-NC-ND, also known as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s necessarily open for all uses. His license explicitly denied using his code in packages. People did it anyway.

The problem with that is anybody can create a package and push it to a registry for others to download. Those packages can be horribly broken or outdated. People then find his repository on GitHub and create an issue that some random person’s package that contains his code is broken and he should fix it. I fully understand not wanting to become the defacto maintainer for a bunch of random packages. Not that he could anyway. This is his comment about talking to their packagers and not him.

He already releases AppImage and Flatpak builds as well as instruction for compiling it yourself on Linux.

This sounds more like a warning that if this continues he’s going to drop support entirely. Sounds like fielding the erroneous support requests is eating a significant portion of his time.

Just because it’s open source

It’s not open source. The maintainer relicensed the project from GPL to the current source-available license last year.

That’s fine. He’s not the submitter nor maintainer of the AUR package. Clearly a bunch of Arch users are hitting him up about it though instead of the listed maintainer of the package when they have problems. I wouldn’t want to try and support something that I don’t have anything to do with either. He can’t repackage it…he can’t do anything. People kept telling him it’s broke. That would be super frustrating.

Seems like just repackaging it would solve the problem a lot easier than alienating a userbase- even if small

Where would it end though? There are thousands of Linux distros. He specifically called out Arch but I’m sure there are others in a similar situation. He gives you a way to run it on Linux that he’s willing to support. He’s a single person doing this in his spare time for free and you want him to make everybody happy. That’s unrealistic. He’s even called out that he doesn’t use Linux himself.

Every OS you support is a massive scale up in maintenance, testing, and time. Each new feature needs to be tested in each one. It’s a pain. Even automated you still need to maintain the vm’s or docker images you’re using to test with. What hardware is this being run on? Who’s paying for it? People will complain that it’s working on this version of the OS but not this other one. It’s a lot.

The overwhelming majority of Linux users are on 4 distros + derivatives. Debian Fedora Arch Suse not “thousands”

Where would what end? Most actually open source projects just publish releases to source and provide as much or as little support as they feel like. Slap a github issues page up and tell every user that you are only interested in dealing with bugs in the most recent version in whatever official channel you prefer eg provide appimage of releases and insist that users reproduce and document bug.

Time wasted mostly wont even bother to create a github account and if they do close issues if they can’t follow directions.