Sx Installer, which is based off blawar's work, which m4xw
has pointed out has the same types of exceptions in tinfoil/hactool (and therefore could only be based on that code), is being distributed as a xecuter product. I am aware Adubbz said its not based on his code, but if thats the case then why is there clear proof that the same exceptions are being used? Are we really to believe that when blawar created DZ he browsed through tinfoils code and *only* used the *exact* error handling phrases and nothing else? That would be the only logical explanation that I could come up with how such a incidence could occour, and that seems as ridiculous an explation as ever.
Its also apparent that he has expanded upon tinfoils original codebase to add a lot of features that a specific demographic really enjoy's, making it a more feature-rich experience for these xecuter users.
If you support piracy, then the argument that licenses were violated probably don't matter to you. If you don't support piracy then you probably will care that blawar violated an open source license agreement to create and distribute this software. Also of note is the source for this has never been provided, which is in of itself highly suspicious.
Add in a 3rd not discussed element, which is the fact that blawar likely profited off this exchange by selling his source to xecuter. We will never know since he would never admit to such a thing, but since I've worked in the background with developers (including xecuter) for a few decades in this scene, I am aware of how this sort of normally occurs. Xecuter regularly offers money to developers to provide to xecuter on a contractual basis so that they can tie down these projects to be specific to the xecuter platform. Xecuter offered the same to m4xw for a retroarch build and im aware of many others who got simliar offers over the years.
Are we really to believe business as usual did not happen here? Lets explore the assumption that blawar freely gave his source to xecuter. People buy products based on feature sets. If xecuter buys a software that violated a license to provide these features, then xecuter is profiting off each sale by using free open source tools with specific parameters meant to avoid exactly this. Which is in itself piracy.
So while this is a nuanced and complicated discussion, it basically boils down to these two scenarios -
I pirate games and I DGAF what xecuter does, because my morals in this regard are limited.
I don't pirate games and I only use my switch for homebrew and want to see the open source culture perpetuated with proper credit towards those hard working devs who made the source public in the first place.
I apologize to those who liked my original comment to which I've edited. I realized that my original comment was being misconstrued as an endorsement for xecuter products. While I frankly have nuanced views about piracy in general (hint - Its not black and white and
what academic research we have supports the notion that console piracy actually increases sales, not hurts it), I don't have to struggle to understand that violating open source licenses harms the community in the long run by disenfrancising those open source contributors.
To go on the record, I am in no way endorsing xecuter products. While I (speaking from my personal viewpoint) generally dgaf what you do with your life, I do care when the actions of a for-profit entity are causing recognizable harm to independent not-for-profit developers who contribute their time openly and freely to our community to provide tools that make our switches better.
And if not for these developers, do we really think xecuter would be where it is today? I think the obvious answer is that while they *could* eventually build these toolsets, that it would take time and that the community would have generally outpaced xecuters products.
I would actually have no problem at all (and freely endorse) xecuter products if there were no license violations. Of course, if xecuter didn't violate these licenses, then would they have the customer base they currently do? With xci loading and (I think mostly proper) emunand, I think they would still have a rich and vibrant customer base. Meaning, they could sell products and make money without crapping on the little guys out there who have made their code freely available to the world with only small requests such as proper attribution.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't causing harm towards those who are in the right to be offended by xecuter products, since they are victims of license violations and/or inproper attribution of prior art.
Also of note is how childish all of this is. Most of these violations could be resolved with simple attribution. Why are people who are making millions of dollars so afraid to give credit where credit is due? That seems pretty goddam childish to me. I would have a lot more respect for xecuter and blawar if they both just said "Yea, I used that code, but most of the additional features are written by me". Not only is it the right and ethical thing to do, its what grown ass men would do. People are so goddamn obsessed with their ego's. Oh noes, what will happen if the public finds out I borrowed some code?!? The entire godddamn world is built off the sweat and labor of the past. Its a part of life and civilization. Refusing to acknowledge this so you can bypass attribution is the height of immaturity.
Since I've written this long post explaining my thought process surrounding this issue, I would also like to point out that I don't hold a grudge against xecuter generally speaking. If they made a post today properly crediting the work of others then all of my issues with them would be resolved. So all the immature posts here on gbatemp about the "tx hate train" blah blah is not the case with me. I have a long past history with xecuter during the xbox golden years and I loved their products and they did great things for the scene and for me personally. I have a lot of thanks to prior owner of xecuter (see more below). Also, I see no moral conundrum with using open source code for a commercial product...thats literally why it exists, to be improved upon. I think xecuter has been supporting their customer base by expanding upon features already existant in the open source community and thats great. I also have no qualm with them basing their business model off piracy (this is me speaking from my personal perspective) because of the academic research posted above showing that there is (currently) no correlation between console piracy and lost revenue. In fact, it actually shows there is a boost in console sales where piracy exists, lending credence to the argument that console hacking increases the utility of these systems leading to more sales worldwide.
I would also like to state that I made erroneus statements regarding the ownership of xecuter in the past 12 months. The issue has come up a few times and in my conversations with the "xecuter admin" (email is
[email protected] ) I was lead to believe it was the same person. Now that I have investigated the issue further, it appears that I was incorrect and I apologize for anyone who may have been mislead by the info I speculated upon.
The original owner of xecuter was a gentleman named Paul who I believe was from the UK. He went by the username "Raptor" and he was the man behind the scenes that ran xecuter. We used to chat on a weekly basis (if not daily) back in the early 2000's when xecuter was the only real company doing solid hardware work surrounding the xbox hacking scene. They contributed back to the scene enormously and helped support a lot of grassroots projects. Paul was extremely generous and I personally saw him give to
many developers and projects.
This is the reason why I have nothing but positive views of xecuter of the past, right up
until he tried to screw the community by preventing xbox360 exploits from becoming public, shoe-horning the software exploit into a proposed hardware solution. We had "worked together" (through many forms such as but not limited to team building, infastructure implementation and sponsorships) for nearly a decade before that incident soured my feelings toward his company. But life is not black and white, and I can forgive him this particular transgression because of the nearly decade long support structure that xecuter provided to the xbox hacking community. For those of you who are not aware, these products are made people like paul filthy rich. Like, 10's of millions rich. I have no doubts that the current xecuter owner will make similar money.
But the xecuter today
is not the xecuter of the xbox days. This has been made clear to me by many things, from the communication (or lack thereof) from the "xecuter admin", to the anti-community actions of the company. Apparently Max Lourantz, the money man behind the gateway products is who Paul sold xecuter to. I have no history with this person and considering the questionably ethical decisions of this person in the past I don't wish to form a relationship with them either.
The old xecuter would never have stolen open source code, sold it, and pretended that they did it all on their own. It should be noted that
in a recent motherboard article on switch piracy xecuter did go on the record half-implying they do infact use community provided code, quote "As for stealing the Atmosphere code, Xecuter did not deny that claim out right, but said “we take inspiration from the work and documentation that is out there,” and “we are far from a ‘cut ‘n’ paste’ job”. This smells eerily similar to
blawar's statement, quote "That said, it has been publicly stated many times the both hactool and tinfoil code was read and drew inspiration from in the creation of the app.".
Do you guys notice the simliarity here? Blawar, who supposedly provided the DZ source (for free) for xecuters sx installer, used
the same exact "drew inspiration from" commentary. Note that this is his way of avoiding attribution properly crediting others who's prior work allowed him to create the DZ application which is now also the SX installer application. Also, for xecuter to claim "we are far from a 'cut 'n' paste' job"
when that has been proven to be exactly what goes on demonstrates that their comments should
never be taken at face value. This is a company of liars, hiring developers willing to steal and lie and reinforce the culture of theft without credit.
For all of the children (really mostly grown man children) who frequent these forums and do a lot of xecuter dick sucking, those who shit-post about "why all the tx hate", I would like to take a moment to break down the cause and effect of this type of behavior.
Developers who freely give the fruits of their labor to the community expect no monetary compensation for their work. What they
do expect is to be properly credited for their work. Blawar will try to muddy the waters in this conversation by claiming that contributors to tinfoil "may not want to be credited", which is absolutely absurd. Their contributions are made publicly on the github repo. If they didn't want credit for their work they would not have contributed openly and publicly to the repo under their public-facing alias.
When a company comes in and tries to monopolize development features by "buying up" the "competition" it only hurts the end-user. We see this behavior happen on tiny scales (like this community) all the way up to massive global macro-economic scales (renewable energy, technology patents, etc). The ability for a monopoly to buy the competition and prevent a competitive market eliminates downstream positive effects for consumers. Without competition in the market there is less product development.
In the incidence of the open source community, this leads to a long-term suppression of developers who are willing to spend their time contributing to a highly toxic community. Not only are they not receiving credit for the fruists of their labor, but then the direct end users
who are benefiting from their contributions to the ecosystem are shitting on them when they complain about this.
This leads to a long-term consequence. It means less developers for the ecosystem. Less developers means less features, less apps, less functionality for the device that all of you constantly bicker and complain about how slow development is on.
In short, everyone who gets pissed off at people like me for standing up for the independent non-profit developers are only hurting themselves and the ecosystem the claim to care about. Its this lack of long-term vision, foresight and a general immaturity that leads to a circular scenario where developers are not being appreciated and therefore leave, never to come back and other developers see this toxic environment and therefore never set foot upon.
For everyone sucking xecuter's dick there is a hard truth you are all refusing to acknowledge - xecuter would not exist in its current form today if it wasn't for open source repositories like Atmosphere. They would be way, way behind development schedule if they had to actually write their own tools, libraries and crypto. The same way that blawar would be no where near where DZ is today if he didn't build his work upon the codebase already existant in the ecosystem. This product you all love so much would be complete shit if it wasn't for all the hard work of not-for-profit developers who have taken strong stances against piracy.
