26
votes
OatmealDome: "The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement"
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- Title
- OatmealDome (@oatmealdome.bsky.social)
- Authors
- OatmealDome (@oatmealdome.bsky.social)
- Published
- Apr 27 2025
- Word count
- 79 words
Essentially the core of Wii homebrew was built on stolen official Nintendo code (from the SDK) and stolen open source code that wasn't attributed properly. Barring the blatant theft of open source code, stealing from actual Nintendo code gives the company fuel to do takedowns of Wii homebrew. So, this whole discovery could put a lot of Wii homebrew at risk for being taken down because of it.
Hector previously brought to the attention of social media the subterfuge of a Linux subsystem maintainer, who was using their position to block the adaptation of Rust in the Linux kernel.
Much ado was made about how when Linus stepped in, Linus asserted that Hector was the problem. Less commonly reported on was the fact that Linus later chewed out this maintainer for essentially doing the thing Hector had initially accused him of doing, leading to the maintainers resignation.
I think you're about on target here. However, I suspect some of the responses might simply be a desire to reflexively agree or disagree with Hector based on his position in the Rust-in-Linux drama.
So, as someone contemplating modding my Wii later this year (mainly to add cheats so time isn't so dang slow in the two Harvest Moon games), what impacts can this have on the overall modding and homebrew scene? Is it likely to impact the core ability to even mod Wii's, or target specific projects, or...?
Unless Nintendo pushes a firmware update (and they won't), no this will not impact how anything works.
What could change is the tooling availability and homebrew store availability.
My suggestion would be to prioritize the modding if you ever intend to.
As someone who's been on the periphery of this stuff for a while, all the attacks seem like "memetic community-preserving ad hominems" to me (I don't know if there's an existing phrase for this sort of phenomenon). Hector Marcan isn't "notorious for starting drama"; I would say he's best-known for being a top-notch programmer, especially in the reverse-engineering space. The most "drama" he's been involved in was resigning from a project after being politicked against for a long period of time.
Linus later told the subsystem maintainer off for the exact subterfuge he was initially accused of. The subsystem maintainer subsequently resigned in protest of being overruled.
It is unclear if that resolution would have happened if Hector hadn't brought so much outside attention to the issue.
Considering Linus' previous public statements in support of Rust in the kernel, with him even lamenting last year that C programmers' stubbornness was slowing its adoption down, that maintainer was earning his ire whether or not Hector joined the conversation.
Yes, Hector was not wrong about the maintainer being out of line stonewalling Rust contributions, but whipping up a social media mob was an extremely poor answer to that debate. Especially since, from my understanding, he wasn't even one of the contributors to the patch in question. Did he even consult the contributors before threatening to go to social media? Linus was absolutely right to tell him off for butting into what's trying to be a professional conversation in such a toxic and immature way.
There was absolutely, positively, nothing professional about the subsystem maintainers behavior.
That still does not excuse Hector's response. While the maintainer was absolutely being an ass, the patch contributors were still doing their damndest to handle the dispute professionally. Barreling in the way he did spat in the face of everyone involved, even the folks he ostensibly agreed with.
Linus first comment was to say to his behavior was stupid and nothing else. After that he didn’t participate in it for a bit. And theeen the next Linus statement was supporting the person submitting the patch.
So yeah, honestly I do think that the end result would be the same with or without his participation on this.
But Linus was also speaking to Hellwig in private and from the bits we know we can guess that he was telling Hellwig off. Hellwig may not have resigned if Linus didn't speak to him that way.
I don't fully know how I feel about this situation (I'm generally more on the pro-piracy/modding side of things), but it seems inadvisable to me to publicly admit you've knowingly been using copyrighted Nintendo code without permission for years.
Either way, I understand the frustration here, but I don't love how this is being done. It reads to me like there may be some personal tensions that led to this suddenly being publicly aired. It feels a bit too drama-inciting to me.
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?
I think what changed is the realization that, in addition to proprietary Nintendo code, libogc included unattributed open-source code.
It probably made a splash in niche circles. The web wasn't as hyper connected, and outrage culture hadn't taken off (injustice/outrageous/offensive content gets more engagement and social media/link aggregators has encouraged that kind of content). The new thing is the discovery that they cribbed off RTEMS.
Edit:
It's definitely bad though, as it poisons the project, derivatives, and the authors can't pick up and make an alternative after working with the code all these years because they're tainted by the exposure to the SDK code. Someone(s) new has to come in and champion a from scratch solution in order to be 100% in the clear of Nintendo legal
I find this wild. Like, your brain itself is tainted by the memories of a copyrighted idea, and so you'll never be able to work on a legal alternative.
I don’t think that’s true though, judging from the Java lawsuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.
Well no. Copyright doesn't protect concepts/ideas. That's patents. The issue here is they can be accused of deriving their work from the copyrighted work, essentially because of the niche-ness of the operations involved. More so now that libogc maintainers are show to be knowingly and willfully infringing on other IP. Like unlocking//interfacing with the wii/gc memory cards. That's an extremely specific operation that's unique to both the hardware and platform. If that operation was provided by the SDK code, but then they later wrote their own, one could challenge the veracity of whether they created that implementation themselves or if it's just a derivative of the SDK code. Rinse and repeat for all contexts that unique to thr hardware/platform.
So while doable, it's a legal quagmire and possibly untenable in terms of time/money if they are legally challenged. Not that the libogc maintainers seem willing/interested in correcting this in the slightest. So it's kinda a moot point because someone new has to champion a from scratch replacement for libogc to keep the wii/gc homebrew scene alive.
As an aside, a counter example is like the owncloud -> opencloud fork with owncloud devs leaving to work on opencloud. The core code is already open-sourced, and anything proprietary/enterprise features that one could accuse them of deriving from the close source upstream (that they had access to when working on owncloud) are generic concepts which aren't unique/novel. Likes like oidc, sso, file sync/sharing etc are just protocol/implementation details and they can simply pull in generic libraries written by other maintainers/projects to provide those features.