[HN Gopher] Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain ...
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Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen
from RTEMS
Author : dropbear3
Score : 138 points
Date : 2025-04-27 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| mouse_ wrote:
| Tragic. Nice to see some accountability on fail0verflow's part,
| though.
|
| devkitpro needs to be shamed for knowingly shipping stolen code!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Sad news, though always good to see someone calling out problems.
|
| Are there any Wii homebrew loaders that _aren 't_ based on
| libogc?
| MelodyUwU wrote:
| i dont know of wii homebrew but in the nds space there is
| BlocksDS which is not part of devkitpro, and in gba space you
| can get (experimental) toolchains from wf-pacman (wonderful
| toolchain). sadly, the nintendo homebrew space is ruled by
| devkitpro, and i spent some time trying to find an alternative
| to it, but that doesnt seem to exist right now.
| MelodyUwU wrote:
| just realized you asked for something different, and my comment
| above is on the wrong subject. either way, i dont know of any
| big library/toolchain/sdk for the wii not from dkP, so the
| chances of a loader different from hbc and not based on libogc
| are small, sadly.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room
| and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software?
|
| One can easily find a bazillion of "github repos" that distribute
| what is evidently directly decompiled game code with minimal
| cleanup. Bonus points if they also claim it is OK as long as the
| game art is not distributed, which in addition to being wrong is
| disrespectful to developers as a whole.
|
| But when the Nintendo copyright czar wakes up, they're the bad
| guys...
| lexicality wrote:
| Just because some people steal software doesn't mean that
| Nintedo's behaviour isn't also bad. It's not an either-or
| situation.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Note that reverse engineering _does not_ have to be clean room,
| poking at hardware without ever seeing any software. In many
| places, poking at the proprietary software, decompiling it,
| tracing it, and so forth is fine despite what unenforcable EULA
| 's might suggest. What is not okay is taking the binaries or
| decompiled source verbatim and re-distributing it.
|
| Note that e.g. copyright does not apply to decompiled source
| code (the original authors did not write the decompiled source,
| unlikely assets taken verbatim - maybe that's where the
| arguments you mention stem from - although note that there may
| be regional regulatory differences). Instead, the things that
| might cause issues are things like the _enforceable_ parts of
| the software license, any enforceable patents on the
| functionality, or enforceable platform license restrictions for
| applications built based on decompiled source.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Note that e.g. copyright does not apply to decompiled
| source code
|
| Where does this non-sense come from exactly? Are you claiming
| the decompiled source code is not a derivative work? It is
| almost a text-book definition of one (in much the same way
| the executable is...).
|
| There are some situations (and this depends on your
| legislation) in which _violating_ copyright is lawful (e.g.
| in the EU, if it is _strictly necessary_ to do so for
| interoperability reasons -- think cryptography for network
| equipment; a decade ago I used to work on this!). But blanket
| distribution of decompiled proprietary (or GPL'd!) binaries
| _is_ a copyright violation (literally textbook, as
| "decompilation" is quite an example of an automated
| translation). And frankly, I have no idea what kind of
| confusion of ideas makes these people believe it is OK to
| distribute game code publicly. Or why it would be OK for code
| but not for assets. (And it has nothing to do with patents).
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > Note that e.g. copyright does not apply to decompiled
| source code
|
| This is absolutely not true. I've been seeing this claim for
| years, and it's complete nonsense. Otherwise I'd be able to
| decompile the entirety of Microsoft Windows and then just
| redistribute it as my own source code.
|
| > the original authors did not write the decompiled source
|
| The original authors also did not write the compiled binary.
| The copyright still applies to it.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| > the original authors did not write the decompiled source
|
| This isn't anything new or unique to programming. In the same
| way if I were to transcribe a movie (let's say it's a silent
| movie) to a script, it would still be that movie. Or if I
| were to translate a book into Klingon . Or even do a cover
| song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright
| would still apply.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| > Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat
| singing. Copyright would still apply.
|
| bad example, in this specific case copyright would actually
| not apply
| amiga386 wrote:
| Copyright _does_ apply to decompiled source code (it 's a
| derivative work of the binary).
|
| However, reverse engineering is allowed explicitly (...in
| several countries, ask a local lawyer!) for the purpose of
| interoperability, and sometimes for certain kinds of
| research. In those cases, what would otherwise be cooyright
| infringement is permitted.
|
| If you're not doing it _for those reasons_ (e.g. to attain
| exacting bug-for-bug levels of compatibility with a
| proprietary system, as is often needed in emulators), if in
| fact you could use any threading library, you don 't then get
| to take an unrelated library and file the serial numbers off.
| TuxSH wrote:
| > How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean
| room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary
| software?
|
| In Nintendo console hacking scenes? None at all, there is no
| point to it, going through the hassle of doing cleanroom as an
| individual is wasted effort.
|
| Though, the spectrum between copy-pasting HexRays output
| verbatim and rewriting things yourself is fairly large.
| Philpax wrote:
| > One can easily find a bazillion of "github repos" that
| distribute what is evidently directly decompiled game code with
| minimal cleanup. Bonus points if they also claim it is OK as
| long as the game art is not distributed, which in addition to
| being wrong is disrespectful to developers as a whole.
|
| I'm sorry, this is supposed to be a bad thing?
| croes wrote:
| This RTEMS?
|
| https://www.rtems.org/
| mubou wrote:
| Is RTEMS an active project? They should file a copyright
| complaint and have the libogc repo taken down if this is true. If
| it were me, I'd lawyer up and throw the book at them.
|
| LibOGC accepts donations via Patreon, which means -- if the
| allegations are true -- they're profiting off stolen code. RTEMS
| could and should sue for damages.
|
| This isn't the first time I've seen an open source project stolen
| by someone trying to pass it off as their own work while
| accepting Patreon donations. I'd _like_ to see some justice every
| now and then...
| arghwhat wrote:
| Being active doesn't matter, the copyright holders still hold
| the copyright.
|
| How much they profit off the stolen portion is also
| questionable, and open source licenses weren't meant to extort
| money but to grant us rights to the code. What they _should_ do
| is add attributions and fix their licensing (libogc needs to be
| GPLv2), or remove the code. Willingly, yesterday.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The copyright holders _might_ have allowed this use, or at
| least declined to pursue any enforcement.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Note that copyright holders for an open source project is
| often a very long list of people that would _all_ need to
| approve of having their contribution relicensed. It 's a
| bit of a complicated matter.
|
| Considering attribution was removed, I doubt it was
| approved, but it's not impossible that they somehow learnt
| and decided not to care as enforcement can be unreasonably
| cumbersome.
| mubou wrote:
| I was thinking more "is it possible to contact them." When I
| googled RTEMS I found that it's originally an OS for missile
| systems from 1993 O_o
|
| But I disagree. It's not extorting money to sue someone who
| stole your code and deliberately removed your copyright
| notices. The open source license only gives you the right to
| use the work for commercial purposes AS LONG AS you comply
| with the terms of the license. If you don't, then you're
| illegally profiting off stolen work. You can't violate the
| terms of a contract while still benefiting from it.
|
| I don't know how much was stolen here, but if it's
| foundational enough to the project that HBC had to give up
| development, then they might have a case, but IANAL. _Not_
| doing anything though would mean letting them get away with
| their ill-gotten gains (again - if true), and I just don 't
| think that's right. Like I said, I've seen similar things
| happen before and it pisses me off.
| delroth wrote:
| > HBC had to give up development
|
| HBC has not been under real development for 10+ years. This
| is mostly a performative act.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| RTEMS is the most widely used RTOS for Science space, and
| it is used in medical devices also.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Also popular for science experiments and is supported by
| EPICS[2]: https://epics.anl.gov/base/RTEMS/tutorial/
|
| [2]https://epics.anl.gov/
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| The opinion that parent was expressing is much the same as
| the motivation behind the Principles of Community-Oriented
| GPL Enforcement[1], which are endorsed by all the GPL
| enforcement initiatives.
|
| The principles acknowledge that copyright allows GPL
| violators to be sued for financial damages, as you point
| out in your post. However, they also take into account that
| lawsuits don't necessarily further the goals of software
| freedom, because excessive litigation could disincentivize
| people from using free software out of fear of mistakenly
| falling into non-compliance. As a result, it's better for
| free software to give violators many chances to comply and
| to provide guidance towards this where possible, and also
| seek injunctions rather than financial remedies if the
| court with jurisdiction allows it.
|
| The principles are well worth a read; they explain a lot
| about how organizations such as the Software Freedom
| Conservancy operate, and why the few lawsuits which they do
| bring are so weird.
|
| It's also worth noting that these principles are sometimes
| considered extreme within the free software community from
| the other side, which argues that the GPL should _never_ be
| litigated!
|
| [1]: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles
| inamberclad wrote:
| RTEMS is under active development and is running around the
| solar system right now :)
| p_ing wrote:
| Wow! What an achievement for those devs.
|
| https://www.rtems.org/applications/
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's a missile OS so this isn't particularly surprising.
| brudgers wrote:
| _I 'd lawyer up and throw the book at them._
|
| Litigation is expensive.
|
| Yeah, hobbies can be expensive and sure litigation could be
| someone's hobby...nothing wrong with that and maybe worth
| having lawyers on retainer if that's your jam.
|
| But in this case, there's probably not a business case...and
| being a civil matter, there's no book-'em Danoh book to throw.
| Just normal squeezing blood from turnips...which again, might
| be someone's hobby at least in theory.
| deng wrote:
| How extremely weird. Why didn't they just use RTEMS openly? Was
| it for clout or did they want to circumvent the GPLv2? I can't
| imagine the Wii Homebrew scene being commercially significant
| that it would matter.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Note the mention that libogc also copies code from the official
| Nintendo SDK, which is proprietary.
|
| I would guess one of three cases:
|
| - They didn't want to respect the GPL, because they thought
| their library would be less popular if it were GPLed. (Many
| homebrew projects don't want to be fully Open Source because
| they want to hold back some special sauce, either to slow down
| efforts by the console vendor to stop them, or to differentiate
| themselves from other homebrew projects for clout. So someone
| building a foundational library for homebrew on a platform
| might want to, legitimately or otherwise, avoid presenting
| themselves as GPLed.)
|
| - They didn't want to respect the GPL because they _couldn 't_,
| because they were also pulling in proprietary code they weren't
| supposed to be using anyway.
|
| - They didn't care because they were already ripping off the
| Nintendo SDK so why not rip off an Open Source project too. For
| instance, they just pointedly didn't care about copyright at
| all, which is a very different position than just not caring
| about code being _proprietary_.
|
| (I can respect the position of "we're ignoring the copyright on
| this old game, so that we can do some awesome
| modding/romhacking", which is very different than ignoring Open
| Source licenses and failing to even give credit. I don't see
| the former as hypocrisy; it's just "we should be able to hack
| on anything". Console game modders / romhackers / etc tend to
| have a huge amount of respect for the original game and its
| authors, and give due credit, even if they're technically
| violating copyright.)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > Many homebrew projects don't want to be fully Open Source
| because they want to hold back some special sauce, either to
| slow down efforts by the console vendor to stop them, or to
| differentiate themselves from other homebrew projects for
| clout. So someone building a foundational library for
| homebrew on a platform might want to, legitimately or
| otherwise, avoid presenting themselves as GPLed.
|
| For context, The Homebrew Channel itself was one of these
| projects. fail0verflow had put shittons of work into DRM for
| the Channel and its installer... purely so that you couldn't
| remove an anti-scam warning screen that they'd put in there
| to warn people about shady people trying to sell The Homebrew
| Channel.
|
| Thing is, GPL requires you to explicitly allow that
| behavior[0], so HBC can't use GPL software.
|
| [0] It is _extraordinarily difficult_ to write a blanket
| copyright license that provides most of the terms we care for
| but prohibits this kind of behavior, without giving the
| authors the ability to veto anything they don 't like.
| Standard operating procedure in the FOSS space has been to
| just allow all commercial activity.
| asiekierka wrote:
| > Thing is, GPL requires you to explicitly allow that
| behavior, so HBC can't use GPL software.
|
| Couldn't, not at the time. HBC has been open-sourced some
| time ago, sans DRM, as the Wii has long lost commercial
| relevance beyond enthusiast communities. This open-source
| re-release is what the repository is.
| jchw wrote:
| Also worth noting: the version of GPL used by RTEMS seems
| to be one with a compiler exception, so it probably
| wouldn't have been an issue for HBC.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes[0], and if Team Twiizers had consciously decided to
| use RTEMS code in that way, they probably would have been
| fine. However, libogc still cannot legally strip out the
| GPL copyright notices and distribute RTEMS code in that
| way.
|
| _That being said_ , RTEMS itself is trying to relicense
| to BSD 2-Clause, which would obviate the concerns over
| copyleft, but NOT the thing that libogc did. In fact, the
| 2 clauses left in the BSD 2-Clause license are the ones
| that require you to retain the copyright notices. So
| libogc is still in the wrong.
|
| [0] https://gitlab.rtems.org/rtems/rtos/rtems/-/blob/main
| /LICENS...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I suspect that it was neither for clout nor circumvention, but
| ignorance and people doubling down on that ignorance. If you
| are not specifically bathed in the norms of the FOSS community,
| GPL is kind of an unintuitive concept. It's a copyright license
| that forces you to disclaim most of the benefits of copyright
| protection. If you're coming from a piracy or game modding
| scene, where copyright is a thing you wipe your ass with, even
| the bare minimum of GPL compliance is going to seem like a
| waste of time at best and someone else trying to butt in on
| your project at worst.
|
| Think about how many pirates do piracy because they think
| copyright is unethical, versus how many of them are data
| hoarders, or just want shit for free, or are reselling shady
| IPTV boxes on eBay. The former two groups are FOSS-adjacent,
| but the latter two _do not care_. Then keep in mind how
| basically any free shit tends to be almost immediately abused
| by children with an Internet connection and no access to
| payment rails.
|
| Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the
| right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy
| scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a
| court.
| dokyun wrote:
| That's what makes it come off as stupid and kneejerk to me.
| This guy wrote "The Wii homebrew community was all built on
| top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement" like it's
| some kind of shocking revelation. The guy writes it in a way
| that makes me think it's fueled by some years-long grudge
| rather than an intent to unravel some kind of conspiracy.
| It's kinda pathetic, really.
| II2II wrote:
| > Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the
| right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy
| scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a
| court.
|
| I realize the homebrew scene doesn't view themselves this
| way, but I pretty much view them as part of the piracy scene
| even when they are antagonistic towards those who pirate
| games. The main difference is that they are "pirating"
| hardware rather than software. By that I mean they are
| overriding DRM created by the hardware vendor to use the
| hardware in unauthorized ways.
|
| Now it is easy to say that you should be able to do what you
| want with hardware you own. In most respects, I am
| sympathetic with that. Yet I don't like that philosophy for
| one big reason: it creates a huge disincentive to those who
| want to create open platforms since it is going to be nearly
| impossible for them to get any traction when they are up
| against jailbroken devices from huge multinational
| corporations.
| asiekierka wrote:
| > it creates a huge disincentive to those who want to
| create open platforms since it is going to be nearly
| impossible for them to get any traction when they are up
| against jailbroken devices from huge multinational
| corporations.
|
| I'm not so sure about that. More specifically, I wonder if
| there are more or fewer Steam Decks in the wild than
| jailbroken Nintendo Switch units.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| I very much doubt that jailbreaking and the homebrew scene
| contribute significantly to the difficulty of building a
| financially viable open hardware platform.
|
| Building a mass market hardware platform of _any_ kind is
| incredibly difficult on its own merits.
| somat wrote:
| What was the nature of the stolen(infringed really) code?
| Because a naive first glance show that they were distributing
| source code from a project that requires that you distribute
| source code.... shrugs, what's the problem here?
|
| So was it removing license comments from the files?
| qwery wrote:
| It's plagiarism.
|
| They laundered source code _from a free software project_ in
| a deliberate attempt to deceive.
|
| (allegedly, etc.)
| londons_explore wrote:
| RTEMS looks pretty replaceable with freeRTOS....
| inamberclad wrote:
| They're pretty similar, but RTEMS targets higher end embedded
| machines and supports more common programming interfaces, like
| POSIX
| TuxSH wrote:
| To me this looks like a bad attempt at exposing dirty laundry in
| bad faith, which is not too surprising coming from him.
|
| 1. Commit 3ba50ec which Marcan is complaining about was pushed in
| 2008 and didn't just delete attrib specifically, but all (?) VCS
| comments indiscriminately. The file was barely touched since
|
| 2. "The authors of libogc didn't just steal proprietary Nintendo
| code (...) ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse
| engineering Nintendo binaries" ---> AFAIK it's software RE work,
| and nothing done in the console hacking scenes is truly cleanroom
| at all, and there's no point to it either as Nintendo can
| knock&talk and/or send strongly worded letters when they please,
| legality be damned
|
| I don't know much about the Wii scene specifically, and libogc
| seems to be a mess in general, but what I do know is that libctru
| (3ds)/libnx (Switch) don't have that drama nor made the mistakes
| made in libogc
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > To me this looks like a bad attempt at exposing dirty laundry
| in bad faith, which is not too surprising coming from him.
|
| It seems odd that you would complain about the messenger, here,
| since it seems you don't actually dispute the message.
|
| > Commit 3ba50ec which Marcan is complaining about was pushed
| in 2008 and didn't just delete attrib specifically, but all (?)
| VCS comments indiscriminately.
|
| So it's OK that they did something wrong because they did
| _everything_ wrong?
|
| > there's no point to it either as Nintendo can knock&talk
| and/or send strongly worded letters when they please, legality
| be damned
|
| There's very much a point to it (when you're building an
| emulator or tooling, rather than e.g. romhacks where it's
| unavoidable), because if you carefully stay entirely above
| board, you can burn those strongly worded letters, make DMCA
| counter-notices, and otherwise rely on the fact that both
| emulation and reverse-engineering are legal.
| delroth wrote:
| > AFAIK it's software RE work, and nothing done in the console
| hacking scenes is truly cleanroom at all
|
| There's a wide gradient of how much effort people put into
| reverse engineering consoles in a legal way vs. just copying
| code straight from their decompiler and slapping an open source
| license on it. libogc is very much on the "didn't even try"
| side of that gradient, it's been known since pretty much
| forever, and even their documentation is straight up copied
| from Nintendo's SDKs for part of their libraries.
|
| What's new here is discovering that even the parts people
| thought were developed "fresh" and not just straight-up asm2c'd
| from Nintendo are actually stolen from other open source
| projects in a way that tries to conceal the origin of the code.
|
| Whether you'll find that "more morally reprehensible" or not
| will largely depend on your personal morals, but clearly for
| some people that seems to be the case...
| TuxSH wrote:
| Yes, libogc is a dumpster fire and the dkP org would be
| better served by rewriting a libogc replacement (w/ a
| different API) from scratch, quite honestly.
|
| What I find odd is the timing, I highly suspect he learned
| about it many months ago.
|
| > There's a wide gradient of how much effort people put into
| reverse engineering consoles in a legal way vs. just copying
| code straight from their decompiler and slapping an open
| source license on it.
|
| Agreed (I replied the same in another comment)
| userbinator wrote:
| _which Marcan is complaining about_
|
| "That prick again?" Not surprised at all. He's been trying to
| stir shit up for a long time, and best ignored as a troll.
| sunaookami wrote:
| >I don't know much about the Wii scene
|
| It shows. It's an open secret to everyone in the Wii scene that
| libogc is based on proprietary Nintendo code.
|
| >but what I do know is that libctru (3ds)/libnx (Switch) don't
| have that drama nor made the mistakes made in libogc
|
| Because WinterMute is not behind them.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Since y'all decided to flag my other comment I'll rephrase: Can
| someone explain what harm is being done by an open source non-
| commercial project "stealing" code? Who is actually hurt by this,
| and how?
|
| Let's ignore for the moment nothing was actually stolen since the
| original authors still have their copies.
| jchw wrote:
| Call it what you want, but it's just disrespectful and
| unnecessary. I'm sure we've all fucked up somewhere and didn't
| attribute something correctly, but I feel like once it's been
| brought to your attention, it's just silly to not at least
| acknowledge it (especially if people are paying you to work on
| it). In this case, it's a somewhat serious licensing issue even
| if it is unlikely to lead to any actual legal action.
|
| Stolen valor isn't really literal theft either, but that
| doesn't mean it's okay to do it.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Okay, sure. But the question is what harm is being done. Am I
| understanding you correctly that your answer is that there is
| none?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Would you accept any definition of harm short of money
| being lost or someone beating you with a club?
| iczero wrote:
| Your code is my code actually. I wrote all of it. Where's
| the harm?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| You have a great point. I'm finding it hard to determine that
| actual harm has occurred here. The problem can be corrected,
| and the hbc project can still meet the requirements and spirit
| of open source. But neither fail0verflow nor libogc seem to
| care about any of this, and instead everything was frozen. You
| don't need permission to use open source code.. So there
| appears to be _two_ double standards occurring at once. This
| story is weird.
|
| >The current 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.
| When we filed an issue about it, they immediately closed it,
| replied with verbal abuse, and then completely deleted it from
| public view.
|
| >For this reason, we consider it impossible to legally and
| legitimately compile this software at this point, and cannot
| encourage any further development.
|
| >fail0verflow.com: "when success just isn't an option"
|
| >https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS?tab=License-1-ov-file
| jchw wrote:
| > I'm finding it hard to determine that actual harm has
| occurred here. [...]. But neither fail0verflow nor RTEMS seem
| to care about any of this.
|
| ? There isn't really any evidence that the original RTEMS
| developers are aware of this situation.
|
| > You don't need permission to use open source code..
|
| "Open source" on its own is just industry jargon. When you
| use open source code, you are copying it in accordance with
| an open source copyright license. The copyright license
| contains certain stipulations around how it is allowed to be
| used. For example, BSD licenses require that the copyright
| notice is included when using the code. IANAL but my
| understanding is if you omit this information even though
| your work is a derivative work of the original you're in
| violation of the copyright license.
|
| > So there appears to be two double standards occurring at
| once.
|
| You should really elaborate who is being held to what
| standards because I can't make sense of this.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The point is that nobody is being held to anything. Who
| will make a case in court? There is nobody to enforce the
| law, and if there was someone, it can be easily corrected
| by including these license files. Therefore nothing is
| blocking either project.
| jchw wrote:
| > The point is that nobody is being held to anything. Who
| will make a case in court? There is nobody to enforce the
| law, [...]
|
| Lawsuits are very expensive for all parties no matter
| what, there is clearly no intent to try to engage legal
| action. That has nothing to do with anything. They're
| trying to distance themselves from illicit behavior,
| including the behavior they already knew about and let
| slide in 2007.
|
| (And I doubt it's being done for legal reasons, but
| distancing yourself from illicit behavior does matter;
| take a look at what happened with Citra. The case
| partially hinged on their responses to piracy.)
|
| > It can be easily corrected by including these license
| files. Therefore nothing is blocking either project.
|
| Tell that to the libogc developers who seem to only be
| interested in burying the problem rather than trying to
| rectify it in any way.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| These points don't seem to be an argument that harm has
| occurred.
| jchw wrote:
| What _is_ harm? Does infringing someone 's copyrights not
| count?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| No, it sometimes does not. The crux is that this is a
| somewhat novel GPL violation, and their knee-jerk
| reaction to freeze development is extreme. It's a weird
| story.
| jchw wrote:
| They just "froze" upstream development, but it was purely
| performative; there isn't actually active upstream
| development.
|
| If you wanted to fork it and continue development you
| certainly could.
| bogwog wrote:
| Copyright infringement _isn 't_ stealing, but people still say
| it is in casual conversation. Either way, that doesn't mean it
| isn't illegal.
|
| > Can someone explain what harm is being done by an open source
| non-commercial project "stealing" code? Who is actually hurt by
| this, and how?
|
| It's an accusation of plagiarism. Do you not understand why
| plagiarism causes harm?
| xbmcuser wrote:
| In my opinion with how much Nintendo likes to sue this is about
| getting ahead of the situation and covering their backside of
| Nintendo wakes up and throw their lawyers at them
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| It's not exactly a secret that the 2000s nintendo console
| homebrew scene is based on leaked SDKs.
| bogwog wrote:
| This is a strange accusation. The repo linked as proof
| (https://github.com/derek57/libogc) consists of over 100 commits
| meticulously converting the libogc codebase to look more like the
| RTEMS codebase, and claiming that's enough proof that it's the
| same codebase. I wonder if it'd even build, or if those changes
| didn't break anything?
|
| Regardless of whether there's any truth to this anonymous
| accusation, this doesn't seem like the right way to go about it.
| An article walking through some of the similarities would be much
| more helpful to prove the point (and probably less work for
| whoever went through this exercise).
|
| At least provide some links to RTEMS code comparing the libogc
| code. The OP cites these
| (https://github.com/devkitPro/libogc/blob/52c525a13fd1762c103...
| and
| https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS/blob/2f200c7e642c214accb7cc...),
| but that's hardly a smoking gun. The function is trivial, just
| filling in some struct fields. The logic for choosing the stack
| size is the same, but it's also trivial and I'd just as likely
| attribute it to the function interface.
|
| I'm not saying it isn't true, I just find this to not be the most
| credible accusation I've seen. This feels like some opensource
| drama thing, and the readme doesn't help, being both lacking
| information and including lines like:
|
| > How disgusting...
|
| EDIT:
|
| also, they have another serious accusation without ANY proof:
|
| > we discovered that large portions of libogc were stolen
| directly from the Nintendo SDK or games using the Nintendo SDK
| (decompiled and cleaned up).
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| For completeness sake; another possibility is that both took
| from the same source.
| jchw wrote:
| FWIW, whether you agree with the accusation or not, it isn't
| anonymous. The commit history makes it obvious that it's marcan
| (Hector Martin) making the accusations.
|
| Whether it's really worth all of the hooplah or not is going to
| be up to taste. I think it's pointless to just not explicitly
| credit RTEMS personally, but I suspect the real point of doing
| this is probably in large parts just to distance themselves
| from the reverse engineered libogc code.
| bogwog wrote:
| > FWIW, whether you agree with the accusation or not, it
| isn't anonymous. The commit history makes it obvious that
| it's marcan (Hector Martin) making the accusations.
|
| I was referring to this repo by github account "derek57":
| https://github.com/derek57/libogc
|
| I assume it's anonymous because the account has no public
| contact info.
| ndiddy wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but publicly announcing that you found out that
| you were using a library largely consisting of decompiled
| Nintendo SDK code, then continued to use it and distribute
| binaries with the library compiled into them seems inadvisable to
| me. On the other hand, the Wii's no longer commercially relevant
| so I doubt Nintendo will do anything about it either to him or to
| the DevKitPro project. Maybe that's why Marcan waited so long to
| go public about this. I'm also not sure why he thought copying
| code uncredited from a Nintendo SDK was good enough to
| "reluctantly continue to use the project" but copying code
| uncredited from a 25 year old release of an RTOS written by a
| defense contractor was a step too far. Different people have
| different moral standards I guess.
|
| I will say that in general, the DevKitPro maintainers are very
| much on the "Cathedral" side of the spectrum and behave very
| abrasively, so the reaction Marcan lists doesn't surprise me. In
| general their licensing philosophy is "make it as easy as
| possible to write homebrew using the toolchain while making it as
| difficult as possible to fork/build your own copy of our
| toolchain". All of the console-side libraries are permissively
| licensed, while the tooling to build at least some of their
| libraries doesn't have a license file, is undocumented, and the
| maintainers ignore any requests for help from people who are
| trying to use it. DevKitPro is also extremely aggressive with
| enforcing their trademarks, to the point of issuing takedowns to
| people who are hosting unmodified old releases of the toolchain.
| Trying to sweep the libogc licensing issue under the rug (i.e.
| moving the issue about the licensing to a private repo instead of
| even just closing it) to try to keep the project Zlib licensed
| tracks with this behavior IMO.
| eqvinox wrote:
| Copyright laws (in sane countries) have (varying amounts of)
| exceptions for reverse engineering pieces that are required for
| compatibility/interoperability.
|
| Whether this applies to the Nintendo SDK... no clue, ask your
| lawyer ;). (i.e.: was there an alternative option to using RE'd
| pieces of the Nintendo SDK?)
|
| It makes sense from a perspective/perception of: with the
| Nintendo SDK, [if] there wasn't really a choice or an
| alternative. With the RTEMS code there was.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| What is "RTEMS?"
| detaro wrote:
| as the link says, an open-source RTOS.
| shakna wrote:
| > RTEMS is an open source Real Time Operating System (RTOS)
| that supports open standard application programming interfaces
| (API) such as POSIX. RTEMS stands for Real-Time Executive for
| Multiprocessor Systems. It is used in space flight, medical,
| networking and many more embedded devices. RTEMS currently
| supports 18 processor architectures and approximately 200 Board
| support packages.
|
| https://www.rtems.org/
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's a real time operating system for for serious embedded
| systems where standards compliance and predictability are
| critical -- think satellites or military drones. It compares to
| VxWorks if you are familiar with it
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| sorry if this is an unpopular opinion, but i have absolutely zero
| problems with them reverse-engineering nintendo code, nor do i
| really care that much about GPL violations against a project
| called "Real-Time Executive for Missile Systems"
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