Hacker drama is always a good time.
Wii Homebrew Community "Built On Lies And Copyright Infringement"
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Voyajer@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world
Comments
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
HowAbt2morrow@futurology.today 3 weeks ago
Cue Thriller Michael Jackson eating popcorn meme
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
It really is. Especially when Nintendo is in the mix.
It’s like an abusive relationship, thinking that one day, Nintendo will turn around and accept them.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ok so, i might be late to all this as i was helping with the damage control. But let me get some facts straight out in the open. Yes this is part of the damage control im doing, but its to battle a lot of misinformation out there. So, lets get into it.
First things first, marcan is wrong. Libogc ( the library homebrew is built upon )'s threading is not rtems. As youll see later, it was inspired by it, but not even close as to a copy paste or plagiarised when it was first made. Shagkur (the one who made lwp) is known to have created some stuff by looking at other stuff and writing code from the ideas. This was asked to shagkur when we were first made aware of the allegations 2 years ago Image
Dkp didnt make this public as they did not feel like it was necessary.
Its only now that marcan made a fuss about it and it blew up that we have to battle this.There is also the fact that libogc is 23 fucking years old. It was made by shagkur in 2003, before git or svn existed and before forums and social media was a thing. So you shouldnt put it up to todays standards either. On top of it, that was made for gamecube, not wii. Marcan was part of the migration to wii so he was part of it too.
I also want to point out that he shouldnt be making a fuss as his mini code, a code base what their bootmii and installer is build upon, contains code that looks very similar to ios, the nintendo code running on the security processor.
Anyway, there is more. Yes people have found similarities, but thats because of how things work, not because of copy pasta. I would like to redirect your attention to this blogpost and investigation by mardy : mardy.it/…/no-libogc-did-not-steal-rtems-code.htm…
Im not going to deny that parts of libogc are semi decompilations of the gamecube sdk. devkitPro didnt know this untill years after it had integrated libogc into its systems. But by then it was wildly used so there was no going back. Rewriting it would also not have been feasible to do alone. Hence the state it is in now. But as far as the new lwp allegations, its all false.
BruisedMoose@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Like "It's the HOMEBREW channel. Not to be used for playing copyrighted software."? I mean, I appreciate that they want to play fair with other open source projects and developers, but isn't the entire emulation community essentially "built on lies and copyright infringement"?
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Any pirate with a decent bon in their body will respect FLOSS license requirements, as they’re mostly their to weaponize the copyright system against proprietary software devs.
That’s fundamentally different to how corporations use copyright law. When you fuck over free software you’re fucking over the people who’re fighting fire with fire.
Lastly, many emulator/homebrew devs specifically rip their own ROMs and dont get involved in illegal distribution of ROMs to keep their projects legal. Lot easier to stick on a resume that way.
BruisedMoose@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Don't get me wrong, I think we're mostly in agreement. Though I'm not sure how big a portion of pirating is done by the self-respecting sort.
misk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Having user supply some copyrighted software that they should own (like BIOS or decryption keys) is entirely different from an emulator or a homebrew project taking and integrating copyrighted code. They’re lucky Nintendo didn’t sue them into oblivion like that modchip guy because they really could.
Grimy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t think any other emulators or console mods do this either tho.
brax@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I see the headline and think “sooooo…?”
I read the article and I’m left continuing with the same question… They’re trying to say that it’s built on a library full of Nintendo code.
Whoop-de-fuck… Other than Nintendo, who cares? Why care? Libraries, SDKs, and drivers SHOULD be free and open source.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They also stole foss code though
Sturgist@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
According to the comment posted above…they didn’t?
Nikls94@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
How can one steal foss code if it’s free and open source?
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
FOSS Community Tries To Go A Single Day Without Controversy Challenge: Impossible
LupertEverett@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
More like Hector Martin Do Not Cause Drama Challenge: Literally Impossible
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I find this particularly funny, because the scene for Wii homebrew felt like the wild west for a decent while. There were many different iOS (think kind of like drivers, you’d install ones with patches applied so you could run non-nintendo code) installers that were almost all doing the exact same thing. Multiple loaders to run ISOs off USB drives. A couple of games leaked early. I remember playing Skyward Sword with a friend a few days early.
There were a small few that tried to enforce not being able to use their homebrew apps for piracy, but they were largely derided for it. Riivolution was a groundbreaking app for arbitrarily replacing game files on the fly, but it had numerous things built in to prevent people from using it on anything but real discs. There was a decent amount of drama around that.
Smash Bros Brawl mods were fucking amazing. There just wasn’t much like that on consoles before then.
Fingolfinz@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What a dramatic headline
misk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Whelp, they’re lucky Nintendo didn’t care enough. Wondering what prompted this?
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Looks like someone decompiled it and compared it to RTEMS code.
What I don’t get is that RTEMs appears to be dual licensed, with one being under BSD… So they would just need to attribute somewhere and then they would be fully compliant.
Maybe the bigger picture is more complicated than that though.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Its not more complicated. I guarantee you some of the devs have beef with each other behind the scenes long before this, and this is just the scapegoat for it. That’s always what happens with these FOSS projects with more than one person working on them.
ByroTriz@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Yes, and?
samus12345@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Ahh, that brings me back. I can still remember the startup music.
The DS was my first console I played pirated games on and the Wii was the second, followed by the PSP, 3DS, and Switch. I remember I chose to jailbreak the Wii specifically because of Xenoblade Chronicles not getting a NA release (originally). Come to think of it, I played Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition on my Switch recently. Full circle!
gramie@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I used the homebrew channel to convert my Wii from Japanese to North American (games are region-locked). Never used it for posted games.
calavera@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
For me it was built on hopes and dreams
fernandofig@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
It hasn’t received an official release in almost 10 years, so who cares. It probably has been feature complete longer than that, on a console that at this point is almost twice as old with a minuscule community.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Its wild to hear it called miniscule considering Wii homebrew at its peak was as big as Xbox or PSP modding.
fernandofig@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
At its peak, sure. But I mean, how many people do you know who still have a Wii and actually uses it? I happen to have one and it’s actually plugged into my TV, but even I rarely play it.
I keep tabs from afar, and the only activity I can see in the homebrew scene is the revival of some online games (by bring up custom/reverse-enginnered serves + patching the games, e.g. Mario Kart, Call of Duty Black Ops, etc.), but other than that, the homebrew scene on the Wii is mostly dead.