The Wii Homebrew Channel has been a staple of open source homebrew software for years now. And now, development has ended on the project, with the repository now archived. The reason behind that is a claim that The Wii Homebrew Channel, which uses a library called libogc in order to function, was using code stolen from either Nintendo's SDK, or from decompiled Nintendo game code. The Homebrew Channel's team had believed that the code from libogc was original, though were skeptical at the time.

The developers of libogc are also accused of stealing code from RTEMS, an open-source project, and removing all accreditation and copyright from the original project, claiming it as their own. Those working on The Homebrew Channel did not want to associate with a project using theft and copyright infringement, and felt that they had no other option than to cease development.

Marcan, notable scene developer, made an official statement, below.

This repository is archived and will not accept any further contributions.

Like most Wii homebrew software, this software depends on libogc. After development of The Homebrew Channel had already started, we discovered that large portions of libogc were stolen directly from the Nintendo SDK or games using the Nintendo SDK (decompiled and cleaned up). We thought that at least significant parts of libogc, such as its threading implementation, were original, and reluctantly continued to use the project while distancing ourselves from it.

It has recently been revealed that the threading/OS implementation in libogc is, in fact, stolen from RTEMS. The authors of libogc didn't just steal proprietary Nintendo code, but also saw it fit to steal an open source RTOS and remove all attribution and copyright information. This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.

The current developers of libogc are not interested in tracking this issue, finding a solution, nor informing the community of the problematic copyright status of the project. When we filed an issue about it, they immediately closed it, replied with verbal abuse, and then completely deleted it from public view.

For this reason, we consider it impossible to legally and legitimately compile this software at this point, and cannot encourage any further development.

The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it's all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered). Together, the developers deceived everyone into believing their work was original.

Please demand that the leaders and major contributors to console or other proprietary device SDKs and toolkits that you use and work with do things legally, and do not tolerate this kind of behavior.

If you wish to check for yourself, for example, you can compare this function in libogc to this function in a really old version of RTEMS. While the code has been simplified and many identifiers renamed, it is clear that the libogc version is a direct descendant of the RTEMS version. It is not possible for two code implementations to end up this similar purely by chance.

Source

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[ChronoCrossfangirl2002]

it's kinda funny seeing people on the internet thinking that their echo chamber who legitimately cares about things like copyright law from such overbearing dickish companies like nintendo act like EVERYONE feels the same way

yeah, most people would probably frown at murder.
using code from 2006 for home brew that was, in most use cases, again, except for developers (or using the wfc or wiiconnect24 which again, in most courts would probably be a curbstomp in nintendo's favour), for piracy? not so much

i don't think they were trying to say that everyone feels the same way or act like that, i mean they literally said "most people's" basically saying that yeah, there are some that neither it matters to BUT most it does matter to.

And they'd be correct, most do I'd personally be concerned if most didn't nor do i believe that most things in the nintendo modding scene in general would be around as long as they have if the vast majority didn't care about copyright law mumbo jumbo, homebrew projects basically breathe on those who care about copyright laws and not endorsing illegal territory.


if you believe the vast majority never cared especially back when things were still in it's infancy, that tells me you simply just weren't around or just enough, recently is only when people started to be alot more careless with things as recent as 2015
and more recently 2024 is when things became a bit more clear that alot of people don't care but that still doesn't equate to the vast majority.

 

[VinsCool]

Well damn, I was not expecting the people behind RTEMS to actually respond, even less so to see them confirm their code was indeed plagiarised by Libogc.
They don't seem to take it too badly, surprisingly.
The last few sentences in the Blog post made it sound like they shrugged it off thinking "oh no, anyway.", but maybe I'm also wrong about that.
Hopefully things still won't really change, regardless of what actually happened at the end.
Like I said in my previous post, we'll only know as time goes on.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

if you believe the vast majority never cared especially back when things were still in it's infancy, that tells me you simply just weren't around or just enough, recently is only when people started to be alot more careless with things as recent as 2015
and more recently 2024 is when things became a bit more clear that alot of people don't care but that still doesn't equate to the vast majority.

And even people who shrug and go "I'll do it anyway" still generally understand when something they're doing is wrong, which is part of the point I was trying to make.

 

[0koren]

So his "proof" is that the code looks similar? Dude never did a copy/paste of another project specific function to then try to adapt it to work?

It's just open source, what is the point of releasing the sources if you are not supposed to read it or to use it as an example to help with an issue you are having on your own project?

I hope this guy includes the copyright of all his children textbook that he used to learn to read and write in his repo

 

[AkikoKumagara]

So his "proof" is that the code looks similar?

RTEMS was already able to confirm their code was copied, and specifically where from, as was some code from the Linux kernel from around the same time period

We reviewed the upstream code comparing it with historical versions of RTEMS and came to the conclusion that sufficient evidence exists pointing to a systematic effort to copy source code from RTEMS (roughly version 4.5 to 4.6) with removal of attribution and licensing information. During the investigation, we also found that the devkitPro/libOGC project has lifted some code from the Linux kernel with minimal transformation. For example, the spinlock implementation is copied directly from Linux circa 2.4 or 2.6 release series. It is also possible that other projects have had code reused in a way that violates their license.

 

[Extrems]

So his "proof" is that the code looks similar? Dude never did a copy/paste of another project specific function to then try to adapt it to work?

It's not one specific function, it's 10% of libogc.

 

[pikachu400]

Homebrew hasn't end it's false news don't believe it anything on this I use dns code my self it work, I try it myself last week,You can still add homebrew.

 

[ChronoCrossfangirl2002]

Homebrew hasn't end it's false news don't believe it anything on this I use dns code my self it work, I try it myself last week,You can still add homebrew.

Well yes, no one claimed it did. iirc The revival services using DNS is something completely separate from the homebrew channel and even if this news was true nothing would stop one from adding homebrew software to their console under circumstance that said program one was aiming to add is archived somewhere.

 

[pikachu400]

Fact's Nintendo cannot banned dns code for or shut down the wifi internet in the 3ds and wii u

 

[Pachee]

I am not sure if this was mentioned before but it seems that it isn't a problem with the developers not wanting to fix it, it's that it requires a lot of rewriting of code and they don't have the manpower/time to do that.

Marcan is a talented person that could do it, but it seems that he won't because of his personal drama with WinterMute.

The other developers of devkitppc seem very open to help fix it.

 

[0koren]

Let's see which fork will take over the project

https://github.com/fail0verflow/hbc/network