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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

by ndiddy 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- giovannibajo1 2y ago
  Of course there was. You can clean-room reverse-engineer the hardware. This is what is done daily by Libdragon maintainers for supplying an open source SDK for Nintendo 64 with zero proprietary code in it.
  - mech422 2y ago
    way back in the before times... Open Source projects went to great lengths to make sure they didn't use anything that could 'taint' the code (eg Samba ) I think the DeCSS stuff wasn't used till it had been publicly leaked and was considered 'common knowlege' or some such to prevent lawsuits
    - amiga386 2y ago
      Not quite. There was nobody holding back on sharing for legal reasons, and it didn't prevent lawsuits. The LiViD mailing list was full of people trying to get DVDs working with Linux, and they were already quite far into it. Derek Fawcus had already written the drive authentication code (so the drive would allow the host to read most disc sectors). A piracy group, DrinkOrDie, reverse engineered the Xing DVD player for Windows and released DoD DVD Speed Ripper (no source code). MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) also reverse engineered the Xing DVD player and released DeCSS (no source code). MoRE consisted of "mdx", "the nomad" and Jon Lech Johansen. "the nomad" reverse engineered the Xing DVD player. "mdx" used them to write a decrypter. Jon made a GUI frontend. Prior to DeCSS's release, someone sent Derek Fawcus the decryption code. And he got around to playing with it, and was going to publish it on the LiViD list. But before he did, DeCSS came out, and also its source code leaked, and Fawcus noticed his own code was in it (the drive authentication code), stripped of his credit. He complained about this and Johansen got in touch, and ultimately he allowed DeCSS to use his code under a non-GPL license. Then, famously, Norway's "economic crime" unit brought criminal charges against Johansen. Ultimately, they concluded that Johansen himself hadn't infringed anything, because it was Derek Fawcus, "the nomad" and "mdx" who did that, and they're not Norwegian. So, with that in mind: - the LiViD mailing list would almost certainly have developed a DVD solution for Linux, not caring about clean room implementation, if DeCSS had not beaten them to the punch - the fame DeCSS got also brought the angry litigators (though eventually justice prevailed) I'll end on a quote from Derek Fawcus: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202051300/http://livid.on.openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1999-October/000548.html https://web.archive.org/web/20001202051300/http://livid.on.o... > Something that may be of interest to people in the states is that I've had an offer of help to produce a specification of the algorithm - from which a third party could produce an implementation. i.e. proper clean room approach. This doesn't really matter from my point of view (or in my opinion most Europeans) but may be of use to the Yanks.
selfhoster11 2y ago
> 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. They've been going after ROM sites. Going after libogc or Marcan would fit their recent MO. I think it is really, really unwise to put libogc on blast like this. It draws Nintendo's attention, which is never good. It would be better to reach out privately, and tell them you'll publically call them out unless they add missing credit and/or remove the offending code. Which for all I know, might have been retired already.

by ndiddy 2y ago

eqvinox 2y ago

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.

giovannibajo1 2y ago
Of course there was. You can clean-room reverse-engineer the hardware. This is what is done daily by Libdragon maintainers for supplying an open source SDK for Nintendo 64 with zero proprietary code in it.
- mech422 2y ago
  way back in the before times... Open Source projects went to great lengths to make sure they didn't use anything that could 'taint' the code (eg Samba ) I think the DeCSS stuff wasn't used till it had been publicly leaked and was considered 'common knowlege' or some such to prevent lawsuits
  - amiga386 2y ago
    Not quite. There was nobody holding back on sharing for legal reasons, and it didn't prevent lawsuits. The LiViD mailing list was full of people trying to get DVDs working with Linux, and they were already quite far into it. Derek Fawcus had already written the drive authentication code (so the drive would allow the host to read most disc sectors). A piracy group, DrinkOrDie, reverse engineered the Xing DVD player for Windows and released DoD DVD Speed Ripper (no source code). MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) also reverse engineered the Xing DVD player and released DeCSS (no source code). MoRE consisted of "mdx", "the nomad" and Jon Lech Johansen. "the nomad" reverse engineered the Xing DVD player. "mdx" used them to write a decrypter. Jon made a GUI frontend. Prior to DeCSS's release, someone sent Derek Fawcus the decryption code. And he got around to playing with it, and was going to publish it on the LiViD list. But before he did, DeCSS came out, and also its source code leaked, and Fawcus noticed his own code was in it (the drive authentication code), stripped of his credit. He complained about this and Johansen got in touch, and ultimately he allowed DeCSS to use his code under a non-GPL license. Then, famously, Norway's "economic crime" unit brought criminal charges against Johansen. Ultimately, they concluded that Johansen himself hadn't infringed anything, because it was Derek Fawcus, "the nomad" and "mdx" who did that, and they're not Norwegian. So, with that in mind: - the LiViD mailing list would almost certainly have developed a DVD solution for Linux, not caring about clean room implementation, if DeCSS had not beaten them to the punch - the fame DeCSS got also brought the angry litigators (though eventually justice prevailed) I'll end on a quote from Derek Fawcus: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202051300/http://livid.on.openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1999-October/000548.html https://web.archive.org/web/20001202051300/http://livid.on.o... > Something that may be of interest to people in the states is that I've had an offer of help to produce a specification of the algorithm - from which a third party could produce an implementation. i.e. proper clean room approach. This doesn't really matter from my point of view (or in my opinion most Europeans) but may be of use to the Yanks.

selfhoster11 2y ago

> 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. They've been going after ROM sites. Going after libogc or Marcan would fit their recent MO. I think it is really, really unwise to put libogc on blast like this. It draws Nintendo's attention, which is never good. It would be better to reach out privately, and tell them you'll publically call them out unless they add missing credit and/or remove the offending code. Which for all I know, might have been retired already.