There is a large group of people quite upset over my handling of open source software.

I maintain my compliance with various OSS (Open Source Software) licensing agreements by posting my project’s source code to my zodttd account at GitHub. The only thing that can be discussed is the lack of timely updates to GitHub on a couple of projects out of many. I was also made aware recently that I may have to pull a Cydia Store product, and I am researching the best way to continue while letting people enjoy the product.

I am addressing concerns over the timely updates by going over my GitHub and making sure it all is up to date.

Note that in order to comply with licenses my OSS ports typically fall under (GPL v1/v2), I should only need to provide source upon request. I feel as though providing sources in a timely manner via GitHub is something I should do, even though it is not required by the license.

That’s the extent of this issue at hand. If you have further concerns you may address them here.

Things have been rough as of late. Please read this one through as it will also shine a little light on why products and updates have not been rolling out. I’ve been extremely busy getting things straight in the “real world”. Though Google’s takedown of my Market and Checkout account couldn’t have come at a worse time. As you may have seen, Yong Zhang (yongzh) of Android emulator fame, was also taken down from Market by Google in the same manner that I was.

First and foremost, our takedowns have nothing to do with any sort of open source licensing violation. Both Yong and I handle developer relations behind the scenes. We give cuts to original authors at times, and I have posted sources to my source repository. Though there is a lot of rhetoric surrounding this, it is not an issue.

Google has no developer relations and support. Instead of Google simply removing the application in question, psx4droid, they did that and followed up a week later suspending my entire Market and Checkout account, with no interaction on my part.

And what happens when you suspend a Market account with a case such as Yong’s with lots of customers? Well you get hellish levels of emails, tweets, etc. that I must respond to most of every day. What’s worse is these customers are pretty stranded by Google. We can’t verify that many customers by hand. There’s no way to honor these previous customers, effectively killing our products. We can’t even issue a refund to users who are furious.

Yong’s emulators built Market up and gave it purpose when there was little to care about on there. Google was well aware of Yong’s top selling apps. Why is Google killing off developers (not even apps but the developer accounts!) that helped them get to where they’re at now? I wonder if they were aware all along. Take high risk apps, make themselves look all nice and open, then once they approach AppStore reach, they pull the developers they used. World may never know.

Right now as it stands, there’s little to no chance of Yong or I getting back on Market without a fight. I appealed and lost with Google in a canned response manner. I can go to 3rd party storefronts, but they have such a small number of users compared to Market, it’s not really an option with the large amount of effort these apps take.

For Cydia fans out there, I apologize for my lack of updates. But with all that has been happening, it made updating so many products nearly impossible. Things have snowballed and I now have so much work to do on Cydia products that it too has become more work than it’s worth.

So I wonder where that leaves me. This has killed my spirits immensely and I think it’s time to change things up.

In the meantime, I’m exploring 3rd party markets and I have decided to make psx4droid free, based it on the open source software PCSX-ReARMed by Notaz, and made it compliant.

You can download the psx4droid 3.0.0 APK installer package right here:

http://www.zodttd.com/downloads/psx4droid_v3.0.0.apk

Developers interested in seeing the source that drives psx4droid, libpsx, can be found here:

http://github.com/zodttd/libpsx

What’s new in psx4droid 3.0.0? Well it’s based on a different emulator, PCSX-ReARMed. It has a better dynarec (cpu emulation technique) and lands up being much faster in general. It’s using a software GPU for graphics rendering, though I have an OpenGL ES 1.1 GPU made. OpenGL ES 1.1 is hit or miss for this type of rendering on Android devices. Many of these high end devices have slow Adreno 100 GPUs. So soft GPU is the way to go for now, especially with some improvements to come.

psx4droid 3.0.0 should have great compatibility, better performance, though it may be a lil rough around the edges when it comes to the settings panel. If you notice a force close in it, it’s bound to be fixed coming up.

Note that all save states previous to 3.0.0 are no longer compatible. If you have quick saves, be sure to turn OFF quick load before running games in 3.0.0. You should save over the quick saves or delete them before turning back on quick load.

Wish I could put this up on Android Market. This will just have to due for now.

Thanks,

ZodTTD