Our mission, our philosophy - non-compromising in being open and libre

Our mission is your mission. Your best interests are our best interests.

This is why we draw a strict line on the following issues:

• RetroArch will always be free - like all good homebrew should be. Free as in libre, AND free as in beer. Compromising on either one of them is not acceptable to us.
• Absolutely no monetization through ads, DLC or other misschievious money racketeering ways.
• We don't believe in spying on you and/or viewing you as a commodity to be exploited and ad tracked. Therefore we don't participate in stuff like Google Adsense and Admob.
• Monetary donations will not be accepted. They are a corrupting force, they create entitlement among users, they create friction among teammembers (since attention would shift from the combined passion of the teammembers to make stuff happen and turn into money racketeering instead), and they would absolutely tear this project apart. Therefore, they will never be accepted - to any one teammember in fact.
• The ONLY exception to this rule is gifts in the form of hardware needed for the project. These are at least objectively valid and non-corruptible ways of helping the project since it is hardware we need for testing and porting purposes. If you are one such general soul who feels like helping out in this regard, contact us at libretro@gmail.com.
• We will never engage in deliberate and shady 'rebranding'of existing open source projects to make it appear as if the 'work/port' is somehow distinct from the main source and as if it is its own entity.
• We will never push ads to you.
• We will never try to tempt you to buy into donation and Kickstarter Ponzi schemes (which is what they are).
• We don't like convenience computing and this idea that 'people are paying for convenience'. We are going to do everything we can to keep old-school homebrew alive for as long as we can. We will gladly resist dozens of MBA brogrammer 'temptations' to join the dark side in doing so.
• On the subject of convenience computing and these smartphone/app store markets - we don't like the 'hucksterism' - we don't like the 'MBA meets brogrammer' movement, we don't like the slime, we don't like the cynical posturing to the tune of 'pretending we are a business providing a service' angle.
• We don't like lots of 'e-mails' flooding our mailboxes with things like 'Maximize you revneues from your app!' and/or do a better job at monetizing your app by downloadingour monetization SDK!'. We have a nice backcatalogue of that type of spam cluttering up our mailbox every day - unwanted. Let it be known we want no part in this 'racket'. We do have standards, and we do have a soul.
• We believe that a future where you have to 'pay' for every little 'app' that is out there and where Google/Apple/Blackberry/Microsoft decide what you can run and where every 'dev' can just push 'ads' to you and 'steal' your personal information is anathema to what computing was supposed to be.
• We provide all the means to any and all devs to make their own builds/packages from source - unlike others everything we do is immediately committed to Github so whatever you can fetch from source on our Github repositories is exactly the current state of development.We know this leaves us wide open to the same kind of 'abuse' as other projects have suffered - RetroArch being GPL alone sees to that. But we hold the overriding belief that by being both 'free' as in libre and 'free' as in beer, we can undercut any and all cynical moneymaking 'copycats' that pop up that have their entire code based on RetroArch. It is hard to beat this non-compromising strategy, and they know it - being 'free' of ads and being 'free' itself is a hard winning combination to beat for an opportunist who only cares about raking in money.
• Unlike other gullible and childishly naive GNU warriors, we very clearly see the abuse happening on apps stores to do with reselling other people's GPL-licensed code and we abhor this. We make absolutely no distinction between ports that were lazily ported and sold for money vs. the ports that received a bit of spit and polish and are sold - they are both equally bad. Donation-ware and soliciting money falls into that boat as well. Here is the deal in case you think this stance is 'extremist' - you are absolutely deluding yourself.
  • We think it's intellectually dishonest to make a big stink about Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft wanting to 'pull' emulators from an app store when you are simultaneously charging users for the privilege of running 'copyrighted' ROMs. Therefore, we don't even engage or participate in that intellectually dishonest doublethink altogether. As soon as you sell your wares - you are fair game - everbody and his lawyer knows this, and frankly, everybody who does this will get what is coming to him/her. There is no free lunch, and you will get what is coming to you. Which is why we will maintain the high ground and not engage in these kind of activities.

Note - these stances are 100% final and will never, ever be subject to change. We feel very strongly in them. They are intended to piss off what we consider to be unsavoury forces in this current computing landscape that are seeking to corrupt this industry and make a quick buck at it on the side.