News: The Bad Side of Doing Projects on the Internet

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Hey! It's been a few months!

I've currently moved on to working on more official projects to expand my profession portfollio rather than hobby projects, so there hasn't been much to post about here. I've stepped back from the SNESClassic hacking and development community almost entirely. I don't keep up with the day to day stuff anymore. But a few days ago I was brought back. At first for a good reason, but it quickly turn bad.

I came across a video on my YouTube feed promoting a product that, on the surface I might be interested in. It had it's flaws, but seemed like it would be welcome to the SNESClassic fans like myself. But upon further investigation and discussion among some of my peers in the development community, I learned that all was not on the up-and-up.

It turns out the creators of the device are distributing mine and others work along with their commercial product. I never approved that, nor would I ever! There was no effort made to contact me by the creators at all, and it seems they failed to contact others effected too.

So let it be said here and now. I currently do not condone the use of any of my work on this site for commercial benefit, or any distribution out side of this website!

Some may wonder why someone like me would care. Well, several reasons.

I put a LOT of time and effort into my work. I don't do it for money, I do it for free to benefit the communities. The only thing I get out of doing it is recognition for what I have done.

Taking the work that I have given freely to the world, and profiting off of it is wrong! What moral right do they have doing such a thing? None. If anyone is to profit from it, it should be me, the one who put in the work. But I don't want that at all, especially with emulation related projects.

By circumventing my choice to only distribute my work through my website, it obscures that "one" thing I get out of it creating and sharing it. The recognition. Others are fine with simple credits buried in a pop-up or ReadMe somewhere, but that's up to them and the magnitude of their work. I'm not. I realized early on that such things would almost completely obscure me from being known to anyone who uses my work related to the SNESClassic. Collections of patches, research into Preset IDs, and a Tool. All of these things don't lend themselves well to visibility as to who did the work on them, but are very significant to the advancement of the SNESClassic modding community and what it collectively has achieved to this day. Instead, even lazy low contributing devs could take my work, put it as part of there own project, and 99% of the people using their project wouldn't think anything other then it was all thanks to him. This is what I originally feared, and why my tool ended up the way it did. Not only do I want proper due credit and recognition for my work, but I also do not want others to be taking credit for my work either. That's why I instead made effort to work with more respectable devs who were willing to respect my simple reasonable choices on the matter. While that original fear was avoided to a satisfactory degree, such is not the case with this new device.

I would like to say strait out "Don't buy XXXXX! They are a cancer on the community!" But mentioning names would only serve to promote them and their product. I'll only say that the product is not "Magic", but more of a curse, or blight. If that helps anyone avoid it.

I'd urge any others to do their part in silencing the promotion of the product in their various corners of the community. They have not taken advantage of just me, but other notable hard working members of the community, and the community itself.