Emulation Creator Of PS1 Emulator DuckStation Threatens To "Shut The Whole Thing Down" Following License Change

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PlayStation emulator DuckStation is rightly regarded as one of the best ways to play PS1 games on modern hardware, primarily because it's incredibly accurate, has loads of features and offers an excellent level of performance.

However, creator stenzek has recently made some changes to how DuckStation is distributed that have caused some drama in the world of emulation.

As reported by Gaming On Linux, the emulator – which was previously open-source under the General Public License – was changed at the start of the month to a PolyForm Strict License and then a couple of weeks later to the CC-BY-NC-ND license.

This means that DuckStation cannot be used commercially, and no derivatives are permitted. The emulator cannot be packaged up, either.

As you can imagine, this move has caused a lot of upset in the emulation community, especially as DuckStation has evolved with help from many other people. However, stenzek claims to have the approval of prior contributors for this shift.

In a statement issued on GitHub, stenzek explains the reasoning behind the change:

I am well aware of how licenses work. That's why I changed, to make it very clear and a deterrent due to certain parties violating the old license, by not attributing and stripping my copyright. Packagers being collateral damage was a beneficial side-effect, considering they don't clearly mark their versions as modified (also a GPL requirement), break functionality, and expect upstream to provide support.
I have the approval of prior contributors, and if I did somehow miss you, then please advise me so I can rewrite that code. I didn't spend several weekends rewriting various parts for no reason. I do not have, nor want a CLA, because I do not agree with taking away contributor's copyright.

Also, I don't appreciate the threats. If you are not a copyright holder, then you are not in a position to make any demands. I find it especially ironic, considering when the GPL was actually violated on multiple occasions, even as recently as a few months ago, nobody ever takes issue with that.
I've restricted the repository to prior contributors, and if they have any concerns, they are more than welcome to do so here. If this turns into harassment, then I'll just shut the whole thing down, because I'm way too busy with my actual job to be dealing with unsubstantiated drama from a hobby that is supposed to be fun. Please consider how the community would benefit from that.