The Homebrew Channel repository is archived (Apr 28, 2025)
31 comments
·April 29, 2025chungy
onli
Not sure trolling is the right word. But it is very strange behaviour, to get so worked up and confrontational publicly, especially as a non-injured party.
Goes right in line with his behaviour in the kernel rust saga. Conclusions are up to the reader.
TazeTSchnitzel
Marcan is an injured party! If you go to great lengths to build a legally clean open-source project on top of a foundation of supposedly legally clean open-source libraries — absolutely critical libraries that have no currently existing alternative — and then discover that their supposed cleanness was a lie all along, it's not just an abstract insult and betrayal, it's a realisation that the immature actions of others have put an entire scene in legal jeopardy.
TazeTSchnitzel
Nintendo are selective with their enforcement, and homebrew is never a particularly interesting target when they also have to contend with pirates, who (in some cases) actually are making money off it. Serious emulator and homebrew developers are however very paranoid about avoiding flagrant copyright violations because they create a vulnerability that the likes of Nintendo could choose to enforce if they ultimately piss them off too much, and also simply out of pride in doing things properly. Marcan is among the serious ones. Sadly not everyone is. It is a routine occurrence for emulator developers that they have to deal with people who think that leaked source code etc is something they should consult and pretend they didn't — exactly the kind of attitude that would send chills down the spines of legal counsel.
I want to caution also that the claims here about violating Nintendo copyrights have been known for some time, that part is not new. The open-source plagiarism is the new part and the most upsetting.
rootsudo
This, but also it's so long ago and old, not current or a previous current gen system. The wii was discontinued october 2013, and released November 2006.
Effiectively its 12-19 years old now, for me, while I understand it also kinda falls under "who cares" because homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
mid-kid
> homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy
I can't speak for everyone but personally I find there's a moral imperative in making sure that we can actually own the devices we buy. Comments and sentiments like these needlessly devalue the work being done to achieve this, and is part of why the broader homebrew community is bitter about it.
karlgkk
> homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.
2mlWQbCK
I installed Homebrew Channel and got all our Wii games ripped to a USB stick. That was far easier and cheaper than to replace the failing DVD player in the Wii. Now the kids can still play all our old Wii games when they want to (not that often to be honest). I have resisted the temptation to sail the seas to expand our game collection beyond the games we already owned.
TuxSH
> People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.
With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.
On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.
The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.
chungy
Nintendo would[1] take all legal measures possible to shut down projects that allow using their hardware in methods they do not approve of. Homebrew Channel isn't new, it's nearly as old as the Wii itself. Nintendo would have had every motivation to go after them for all they're worth, if there was a valid legal claim against Homebrew Channel.
Unfortunately for Nintendo, reverse-engineering a console to run code the first party has not authorized is not actually a violation of any law. Nintendo surely was grumpy at them, but they had no leg to stand on.
[1] And still does, see their takedown of yuzu, who was openly allowing and encouraging Switch piracy in the Discord server.
null
notachatbot123
messe
I think this comparison by armada651 linked in yesterday's thread is a better example (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818214)
https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS/blob/2f200c7e642c214accb7cc...
https://github.com/devkitPro/libogc/blob/52c525a13fd1762c103...
Multiple functions in that file are near identical.
karel-3d
I am not up-to-date with the drama
The original code this was copied from was open source; why not "just" say "oops we are sorry" and add the attribution?
Licensing issues? But the repo in OP is also GPL?
deng
See also:
https://mas.to/@davejmurphy/114414723608693881
There's a legal and moral implication. Legally, saying that you took someone else's code as "source of information" would probably be seen as copyright infringement. Morally, I must say I find it difficult to get worked up about it. How to write a basic OS with a threading implementation shouldn't be rocket science for anyone with a good CS background (yes, I'm aware RTEMS was literally written for rockets, but still). Yes, he took a shortcut here by looking at an existing project, and if this was a commercial project, I might see why one could get angry. However, I also can't really understand why they simply refuse to give credit to the original project and maybe also change the license to GPLv2.
TuxSH
IANAL, however:
> maybe also change the license to GPLv2
Without a CLA, that's not doable without the approval of all the contributors.
Furthermore, the point of these libraries (libogc, libctru, etc.) are to be a FOSS SDK. Non-permissive license like GPL aren't really an option in this situation.
If I'm not mistaken, RTEMS has been relicensed to BSD-2; even if the licenses were incompatible at the time, they don't seem to be anymore.
karel-3d
Ah then it's easy to solve, if the parties worked together.... which they won't, so, whatever
msm_
>Legally, saying that you took someone else's code as "source of information" would probably be seen as copyright infringement
Not necessarily. There are ways to work around that, for example white box reverse-engineering[1]. Also there are exemptions for some use cases, like interoperability. I'm sure a lawyer could figure something out, but it looks like they didn't consult any, and didn't follow a rigorous process.
[1] https://ospo.co/blog/modern-reverse-engineering/ - a random link I found by googling, but presents the idea well.
deng
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812995
smcin
<deleted>. My mistake
devixluvic
The blog you linked is to Homebrew, the package manager for macOS. "The Homebrew Channel", the Wii project that is in discussion here, is unrelated despite sharing a name.
smcin
Thanks for the correction.
dharmab
Wrong Homebrew. Totally unrelated to this.
zombot
So this has nothing to do with the Homebrew package manager on macOS? I'm confused.
trashburger
[flagged]
So, allegedly it stole Nintendo SDK code, and Nintendo never noticed nor filed any kind of injunctions, especially since this was an extremely popular jailbreak tool when the Wii was the current console?
This isn't passing the sniff test. I think Marcan is just trolling.