• DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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    2 hours 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

    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 : https://mardy.it/blog/2025/04/no-libogc-did-not-steal-rtems-code.html

    Inline edit about the blog: i want to point out the lwp code also evolved over time to fit newlib better and to integrate standard c/c++ code better. But lets keep going, shall we?

    Im not going to deny that parts of libogc are semi decompilations of the then leaked 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.

    Also, and this is my personal thing, hbc archiving their repo was a pure dick move. They didnt do anything with it anymore, they didnt merge or accept improvements nor did they want to release a new version that would have fixed some stuff for wiiu/vwii. Its was considered dead by the community ages ago…

  • brax@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours 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.

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 hours 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.

  • fernandofig@reddthat.com
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    19 hours 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 miniscule community.

    • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      22 hours ago

      Its wild to hear it called miniscule considering Wii homebrew at its peak was as big as OG Xbox or PSP modding.

      • fernandofig@reddthat.com
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        22 hours 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 bringing up custom/reverse-enginnered servers + 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.

        • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          21 hours ago

          Shame, probably the most widespread consumer platform you can port ppc distros to.

          If I and more time and energy it’d be neat to try and port something over.

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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      22 hours ago

      OSS licensing just needs enforcement, especially with the libogc attitude towards the GPL.

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.today
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      22 hours 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.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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        22 hours ago

        The major problem here is stealing code from not just Nintendo but also another GPL project.

  • BruisedMoose@piefed.social
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    23 hours 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
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      22 hours ago

      Any pirate with a decent bone in their body will respect FLOSS license requirements, as they’re mostly there 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
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        11 hours 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
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      22 hours 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.

    • Chozo@fedia.io
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      22 hours ago

      but isn’t the entire emulation community essentially “built on lies and copyright infringement”?

      No way, it’s totally for “archival purposes”.

      • macniel@feddit.org
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        22 hours ago

        No it’s for testing the limits of the hardware you legally own. E.g. installing Linux and or a Fileserver on it.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    22 hours ago

    “The authors of libog didn’t just steal proprietary Nintendo code, but also saw it fit to steal an open source RTOS and remove all attribution and copyright information,” continues the statement. “This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft [and] copyright infringement.”

    It is claimed that the developers of libogc are “not interested in tracking this issue, finding a solution, nor informing the community of the problematic copyright status of the project” and that when the team behind The Homebrew Channel filed an issue on Github, it was “immediately closed” and met with “verbal abuse” before being “completely deleted from public view.”

  • misk@sopuli.xyz
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    23 hours ago

    Whelp, they’re lucky Nintendo didn’t care enough. Wondering what prompted this?

    • killeronthecorner@lemmy.world
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      20 hours 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
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        18 hours 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.

        And its almost always over the dumbest things like “they liked X tweet on Twitter I don’t like” or “they didn’t do something I wanted.”

        They were complicit in allowing the supposed shady code for a long time, what suddenly changed? Its not incredibly hard to imagine.

  • gramie@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours 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.