I'm not going to tell you ( @The General ) what to do, I respect every decision you make with your emulator or projects. But from my perspective people have been asking for an open source version for years. Your emulator is known as one (if not) the best retro emulator on RaGEZONE. It is not your responsibility, let me make that clear,
but you could've released an open source version of your emulator to improve the development of retros. Look at the amount of people that are working at a re-make of your emulator and what they are able to accomplish. You could've accomplished even greater things
if you worked together with all the talented developers on RaGEZONE. It also could've boosted the development of Habbo Hotel greatly.
I'm trying to make a point here; the state of the forum is not only to blame on the staff of the forum. And I'm not saying it's only to blame on the community neither, but there were certain people in the right position to boost the development. I'm not pointing at you only, there are many more closed source emulators on RaGEZONE.
Arcturus was open source for 3 years. After a year of literally no contributions I continued closed source. There was a plugin API to extend functionality which was well documented.
But in the end it doesnt matter, people cannot show any respect for other peoples work and their own monetary gain, attention is more important than the original authors wishes.
There have been numerous times where people have explicitly told me, Ive seen what happened to Butterfly / Arcturus and thats why I dont want to release my work. Thats a clear sign that people are generally dicks and on top of that its tolerated.
People from morningcrap have hacked my personal accounts, doxxed me (I got linkedin invites, and list of people who viewed my profile, which includes ex RZ staff), hacked my RZ account, emails. Not to mention they bought my old domain that lapsed and now redirect it to their own crappy website which states that I had the intention to monitize the project which for some reason they think gave them the right to do what they do and also imply that I am okay with what they are doing. Not only that they are twisting my words as I have said, dont like it use something else. That else meaning an other emulator, not stealing and renaming that emulator you are constantly shitting on. They are too lazy and to cheap to put in their own actual effort and as long as this toxic behavior is tolerated here, this section is doomed. RZ couldve been a great example on how to set the opinions in an community in order to encourage developers to share their work. The amount of influence RZ has had in the past is its own downfall as toxic attitude is accepted, unfortunately.
The real issue and you keep avoiding it and I will keep reiterating it: You cannot simply relicense your emulator no matter how much you want to ignore the elephant in the room, you accepted contributions under the terms of the GPL license, you must ask every single contributor for permission to relicense your project. Literally anybody who knows anything about software licenses knows this. It happens all the time, a project wants to relicense so they remove prior contributions from people who don't want to comply with the new suggested license. The only way you could change the license is if you had made the project MIT licensed.
You can't claim to want people to follow a software license when you yourself are attempting to violate the GPL.
You are 100% incorrect and are missing the point. This problem is not about what is legal and what is not. Its the problem of getting your e-peen out of eachothers arses and mature the duck up and respect the wishes and effort of the original authors. But no, having your name on a stolen emulator is apparently going to get you kudos nowadays, supposedly. What they do, have done, and most likely will keep doing is wrong and its a shame that this kind behavior is accepted, tolerated and even encouraged.
As I am the author I have the copyright to the code I wrote. Any contributions to the code belong to those who have made them. As 1.9.0 is still open source anyone can use that to build their emulator upon. It is perfectly legal to continue a closed source version even if you are not 100% the author. See google authenticator, was open source but continued closed source. What is illegal is decompiling closded source software, redistributing, rehosting its sources.
I have had asked the majority of contributors if they were okay with changing it closed source and from those who I got a response they were totally fine with it as long as the old version was still open source, and to this day it still is. And not to mention, the old license did say: Do not rename, do not claim as yours, do not rehost the sources outside of bitbucket without my explicit permission. Hurr durr license.