Many mobile emulator Devs are like that unfortunately, no desire to improve things for the emulation community, AetherSX2's dev was like that as well, though he went a step further and sold to a Chinese dev team who put ads and malware in it.

There is no valid excuse for locking down an Emulator, it's either to hide the fact that they used SDK material or because they want to sell it later, either as a product to you or sell it to another Dev team (can't easily do that with open source as it'll be forked and the buying dev will be labelled shady or bad by the community). Saying "to prevent plagarism" is a Bullshit excuse because as well, Android did and still does have a thriving open source community, they don't do it to prevent plagarism, they do it for money or to hide their own plagiarism (SDK or copying GPL code).

[–] XyliaSky@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I’m fairly certain exophase just charged for Drastic because they knew it was leagues better than every single open source emulator for Nintendo DS on the Arm platform, and people absolutely would pay for it.

I mean, I guess it’s fair for people to charge for their work. But I do have to wonder if the entire project was novel, Y’know?

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I can't say for certain whether it was done malicously out of greed or not. I do know that in the Mobile space there's a lot of precedent for that, with other emulator Devs who build closed source projects, then swiftly abandon, sell them off, or turn them into adware.

When it comes to emulation I feel like devs should contribute to the scene via open sourcing their projects, this ensures that their work can benefit others and that it can be continued in their absence. If they still want to charge for it they can do what Fedilab did and just sell it on Google play but have it be Free on Fdroid and the Git Repo.