Promising 3DS emulator Citra was taken down recently as collateral damage in Nintendo's shutdown of Switch emulator Yuzu, but a rival emulator – known as Lemonade – has swiftly stepped into the spotlight. There's just one problem: it seems the team behind it has stolen code from Citra.
Pablomf6, who worked on Citra, has taken to social media to air their disapproval.
"I want to publicly report today that Lemonade, an "open source 3DS emulator" is STEALING MY CODE," says Pablomf6 on Twitter. "Not only that, but when I reached the developers, they started referring to me in a very disrespectful way."
Pablomf6 adds:
Citra was licensed with the GPL license. This, among other things, forces anyone using the licensed code to keep it open source and credit the authors. However Lemonade developers were not complying with it.
Using the benefit of the doubt, I created an issue in their Github repository explaining the GPL issue, you can find it here.
However, not long after that, more commits without proper crediting started appearing in their repo. This time not only mine, but from gpucode/emufan4568, another former Citra developer.
Not only that, but they have started refering to me in their discord server using the name of a criminal. This is highly disrespectful.
I want to remind everyone that me and gpucode are maintaining a fork of Citra, in an effort to ensure 3DS game preservation. Unlike Lemonade, we believe in respect and cooperation between devs, so please consider using our version instead.
While it's a shame that the team behind Lemonade don't seem to be doing everything above board, it's good news to know that Citra has been forked and that its development will continue.