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Homebrew app [RELEASE] RiftWii: play Riivolution-format mods from USB, SD or disc

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ishtar
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Ishtar said:
RiftWii 2.7.0 is out (stable)

It's been a week of betas and release candidates since 2.1.0, and testers checked all of it on real Wiis, so 2.7.0 is the new stable. If you're on 2.1.0 with updates set to Stable, RiftWii offers it by itself.

What's new since 2.1.0
  • Code builds: Brawl mods made of Gecko codes (Project+, REX, PMEX Remix) start from RiftWii, with a virtual SD card image so they don't need your real card's layout (experimental)
Click to expand...
Does it work with BrawlEx?
 
XFlak said:
I haven't had a chance to look through the changes to your repo since I posted, but I'm already quite happy so far with your attitude and quick action and reply.
Click to expand...
I took a peek, and I'm not thrilled with this comment "Now go fuck yourself, GPL police."
XFlak said:
I had a run-in with the "GPL police" 😂🚨 back in 2011 when I didn't have the slightest clue about this stuff, and took a lot of actions to make sure I'm compliant.
Click to expand...
I'm assuming you took my joke and ran with it (?). Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you were kidding too, but there's a time and place for GPL jokes, and source code isn't one of them. Consider taking this a bit more seriously, and let's save the jokes for forums like this, cool?

While I appreciate you've tried to make things right, I'm not sure if that's possible without going back to square one, which I'm sure you'd prefer to avoid but I don't see any other way to be compliant with licenses. The issue is that when you feed a LLM sourcecode for other apps it will often use it as a blueprint (even without asking it to), as was the case here. That's why RiftWii's using the same libraries and has the same/similar file and function names in more than a few places, etc as USB Loader GX. This makes it a derivative work, which needs to have the original licenses (with contributors) to be in place in full and in each file. But this would be difficult (impossible?) for you to do at this stage, since there's no way to reliably determine what code the AI copied (or used as a blueprint) and what licenses need to be added back and where. This is something that an AI would probably have needed to have spelled out for it at the start of such a project.

I'm not here to police you, I'm just making this final post on this matter because where we last left things others may think everything is fixed from a licensing perspective, but it's not. I highly discourage taking a relaxed view to license compliance, and I can promise you that if behavior like this becomes wide-spread, more and more open-source developers will start building closed-sourced applications instead, potentially even in homebrew communities like this one. I'm a big fan of open-source, and don't want to see it slowly wither and die.

Thanks for your attention, see ya!
 
Last edited by XFlak,
I agree licenses are annoying, but that commit was poor taste. Either way, I don't think it's necessary to stir the pot
 
XFlak said:
I took a peek, and I'm not thrilled with this comment "Now go fuck yourself, GPL police."

I'm assuming you took my joke and ran with it (?). Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you were kidding too, but there's a time and place for GPL jokes, and source code isn't one of them. Consider taking this a bit more seriously, and let's save the jokes for forums like this, cool?

While I appreciate you've tried to make things right, I'm not sure if that's possible without going back to square one, which I'm sure you'd prefer to avoid but I don't see any other way to be compliant with licenses. The issue is that when you feed a LLM sourcecode for other apps it will often use it as a blueprint (even without asking it to), as was the case here. That's why RiftWii's using the same libraries and has the same/similar file and function names in more than a few places, etc as USB Loader GX. This makes it a derivative work, which needs to have the original licenses (with contributors) to be in place in full and in each file. But this would be difficult (impossible?) for you to do at this stage, since there's no way to reliably determine what code the AI copied (or used as a blueprint) and what licenses need to be added back and where. This is something that an AI would probably have needed to have spelled out for it at the start of such a project.

I'm not here to police you, I'm just making this final post on this matter because where we last left things others may think everything is fixed from a licensing perspective, but it's not. I highly discourage taking a relaxed view to license compliance, and I can promise you that if behavior like this becomes wide-spread, more and more open-source developers will start building closed-sourced applications instead, potentially even in homebrew communities like this one. I'm a big fan of open-source, and don't want to see it slowly wither and die.

Thanks for your attention, see ya!
Click to expand...
Fair points, you're right about that comment. It shouldn't have been in the source, joke or not, and I'm sorry about that.

Some context, not an excuse: I've watched people get pushed off platforms over small license mistakes, piled on instead of just being told what to fix. That's where the sour joke came from. It still wasn't the right way to say it, so I rewrote that achievement. It now thanks the developers whose work RiftWii builds on, and says the GPL is there to protect people who share their code: https://github.com/KakarottoCake/Riftwii/commit/0478ec1

For what it's worth, RiftWii is a hobby for me. I don't make money from it, I don't ask for donations, and everything is open source. I have a lot of respect for the developers who did the hard work of making this stuff possible in the first place, and I want them credited properly.

On the derivative-work question: RiftWii is GPL-3.0-or-later like USB Loader GX, so the issue is attribution rather than compatibility, and I wanted to answer it with evidence rather than reassurances. I compared RiftWii's source file by file against USB Loader GX's and libwiigui's, looking for:
  • code that matches as written, or with the names changed
  • function names both projects define
  • constants both projects use
Then I checked every match by hand. The method, a script anyone can rerun, and every finding are here: https://github.com/KakarottoCake/Riftwii/blob/main/docs/ATTRIBUTION_AUDIT.md

The GX code it found (the Wiimmfi and per-game patch data, the Kirby patch, the code handler pieces) was already credited in NOTICE.md and in those files' headers. It also turned up things I'd missed:

If anyone finds something the audit missed, open an issue and it'll get the same treatment.

I'll also be upfront: AI tools were part of how RiftWii was written, and GX's source was a reference for the features NOTICE.md lists, which is exactly why I checked mechanically. Thanks for taking the time to write this out. I care about open source staying open too.
 
I wonder if, someday, people will be putting disclaimers on things for being 100% human-drawn/coded/acted?
That said, good job on fixing licensing whoopsies. Might try this out if I ever get any modpacks for my WBFS games... might try playing Newer with it to test retail discs too.
 
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