Agreed! Cemu is a great piece of software, but coming after Dolphin, the premiere open source console emulation project, it was pretty lame that they opted for closed source.
In the case of Cemu, I understand that closed source = $20k/mo in Patreon subscriptions which enabled a blistering pace of development in 2017. It's my hope that the developers eventually open up the source after the subscriptions dry up.
For long-term support, something that is extremely important when you're dealing with games that will eventually be decades old, open source is critical.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is still dirty code in the source, but then again Exzap seems decently professional so he might know better.
As I suspected, Patreon had a good bit to do with this, although he underplayed its significance and overplayed the significance of keeping a tight leash on the codebase.
I have my reservations about closed source software due to hidden nasties, but I also don't generally compile my emulators from checksum-verified source code, so it's somewhat a moot point.
As long as Exzap holds true to his promise about eventually making the entire thing open source, or even better, slowly open sources various aspects of the engine over time, then I will respect his decision to keep the source closed—Even if I don't agree with it.
There's certainly been speculation that Cemu was helping along by documentation/SDKs that should have under NDA (from the pace of development etc.), so I wouldn't be that shocked if they were keeping it closed until that is engineered out.
Does it have to be closed source for the Patreon? A significant amount of open source developers have their own successful Patreon. And it's freely downloadable so it's not like that is the Patreon incentive.
Let's be honest, if they open sourced it, even if it was a restricted form of open sourcing, it would spawn a kazillion of forks, some of them bad forks for fraudulent practices for piracy and the profits will plummet.
Occam's razor. Don't overthink it, it's just more profitable that way and the probability of open sourcing it making it more profitable is very minuscule in practice.
I imagine they made that choice with the intention of preventing others from wrestling control from the devs with a libre fork at the early stages of development when they weren't sure just how much money they would make through Patreon. The release cycle favors Patreon subscribers by a week or two. As compatibility rounds out, this will be less of a draw.
It's a little similar to how PJ64 did things for a while with their donor system, except AFAIK PJ64 is still closed source.
In the case of Cemu, I understand that closed source = $20k/mo in Patreon subscriptions which enabled a blistering pace of development in 2017. It's my hope that the developers eventually open up the source after the subscriptions dry up.
For long-term support, something that is extremely important when you're dealing with games that will eventually be decades old, open source is critical.