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.<p>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.
To me this looks like a bad attempt at exposing dirty laundry in bad faith, which is not too surprising coming from him.<p>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<p>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<p>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
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>like</i> to see some justice every now and then...
How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software?<p>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.<p>But when the Nintendo copyright czar wakes up, they're the bad guys...
> The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement<p>I think you can find evidence that basically all emulation since at least the N64 has been based on stolen SDKs and massive amounts of drama and infighting between overly-passionate groups of people.<p>Not to mention almost every single emulator developer pirates massive amounts of ROMs in order to test and debug games with their code. Many of them also have troves of proprietary SDKs as well.
It's curious that the infractions were known about for so long—decades—but didn't make the news. I guess something happened to cause Marcin to speak up about it in 2025. But what?
This is a strange accusation. The repo linked as proof (<a href="https://github.com/derek57/libogc">https://github.com/derek57/libogc</a>) 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?<p>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).<p>At least provide some links to RTEMS code comparing the libogc code. The OP cites these (<a href="https://github.com/devkitPro/libogc/blob/52c525a13fd1762c10395c78875e3260f94368b5/libogc/lwp_threads.c#L580">https://github.com/devkitPro/libogc/blob/52c525a13fd1762c103...</a> and <a href="https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS/blob/2f200c7e642c214accb7cc6bd7f0f1784deec833/c/src/exec/score/src/thread.c#L385">https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS/blob/2f200c7e642c214accb7cc...</a>), 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.<p>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:<p>> How disgusting...<p>EDIT:<p>also, they have another serious accusation without ANY proof:<p>> we discovered that large portions of libogc were stolen directly from the Nintendo SDK or games using the Nintendo SDK (decompiled and cleaned up).
Isn't this like almost 20 years of history down the drain, including the project that gave marcan notability? Quite an event to transpire. It's crazy that millions of us looked at projects like THC as being acts of brilliance, not merely theft. There cleary were brilliant people involved in the project (segher who helped reverse engineer the NES/SNES/N64 CIC for example) so I don't doubt they're not capable.
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"
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?<p>Let's ignore for the moment nothing was actually stolen since the original authors still have their copies.
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