NUS: Are we fucked?

[K0rbo]

Let's face it: the Wii U's NUS will eventually shutdown for good, and from what I've seen, Nintendo pretty much has it on life support. So many different parts of Wii homebrew (theming, WiiLink, pretty much most stuff related to patching WADs,) rely on the NUS. As far as i know, the moment the NUS shuts down, there will be no legal way to acquire anything that was on the NUS, except from personal backups, which are bound to dwindle in number. That brings me to the second half of the title, and to the question I'm here for. I can't see any legal contingency plan for the inevitable shutdown, so:

Are we fucked?

 

[Kwyjor]

there will be no legal way to acquire anything that was on the NUS, except from personal backups, which are bound to dwindle in number

I'm sure at this point there are a bazillion backups and backups of backups. How many do you need, really?

The amount of functional Wii U units is bound to dwindle in number too.

 

[MysticStarlight]

Maybe you could legally dump some wads from game discs? Just Dance 2020 should have the latest IOS wads in its ''UPDATE'' partition/folder. Yeah you wouldn't get ALL the wads, but the most important wads (critical IOSes, System Menu, etc) would be inside the games I believe.

 

[OniOkami666]

Let's face it: the Wii U's NUS will eventually shutdown for good, and from what I've seen, Nintendo pretty much has it on life support. So many different parts of Wii homebrew (theming, WiiLink, pretty much most stuff related to patching WADs,) rely on the NUS. As far as i know, the moment the NUS shuts down, there will be no legal way to acquire anything that was on the NUS, except from personal backups, which are bound to dwindle in number. That brings me to the second half of the title, and to the question I'm here for. I can't see any legal contingency plan for the inevitable shutdown, so:

Are we fucked?

Well, I mean it kinda depends, once again, we don't really know when NUS will shut down. As far as I know, nobody has made an announcement here yet. It's true that NUS is the most important part of wii and wii u online services so it would be bad if it shut down. I also think the shutdown of NUS would kinda of be a good thing at the same time because then, wiishop revivals will stop popping up (hopefully).

 

[Exidous]

The availability of NUS is very convenient for a common kind of coder. People who want to help others enhance the capabilities of retro hardware, but without distributing proprietary code (which some snot eating bastards would malign as copyright infringement). With NUS, they can release software that looks to NUS for the often inescapably necessary copyrighted components of a complete package. The software just tells the end user's client to get what it needs from 'somewhere else'.

Without NUS the coder's options are either directly redistribute Nintendo's proprietary code, or release practically 'incomplete' software that requires the end user to 'go find' the missing piece.

Losing NUS costs the scene a face-saving distribution model for homebrew. The actual data from NUS is in no danger of going extinct.

 

[K0rbo]

wiishop revivals will stop popping up (hopefully).

true