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Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

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Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#51

Post by Philpax »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #4

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.…

> 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?

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#53

Post by asiekierka »

II2II wrote: post #49
kmeisthax wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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" hard…

> 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.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#54

Post by frumplestlatz »

II2II wrote: post #49
kmeisthax wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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" hard…

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.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#56

Post by 1970-01-01 »

jchw wrote: post #50
1970-01-01 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

These points don't seem to be an argument that harm has occurred.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#57

Post by MisterTea »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #37
mubou wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

RTEMS is the most widely used RTOS for Science space, and it is used in medical devices also.

Also popular for science experiments and is supported by EPICS[2]: https://epics.anl.gov/base/RTEMS/tutorial/

[2]https://epics.anl.gov/

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#58

Post by bogwog »

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).

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#59

Post by jchw »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #56
jchw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These points don't seem to be an argument that harm has occurred.

What is harm? Does infringing someone's copyrights not count?

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#60

Post by ndiddy »

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.

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