At this point I’m very concerned about the open source industry relying so much on github. You have to remember that any project there can be swept away overnight because it doesn’t fit into the agenca of a large company, for example.
The author was bullied by Nintendo into voluntarily removing the repos, it wasn’t DMCA’d.
GitHub had nothing to do with this one. And just like with Yuzu, plenty of people have uploaded copies of the repo already, thanks to git’s decentralized nature where everyone have a full copy of the entire history.
Git itself isn’t decentralized is about people copying it and sometimes mirroring it.
Anyway it is a good habit to avoid github entirely (when hosting a repo).
Git itself isn’t decentralized is about people copying it and sometimes mirroring it.
Not sure what you mean. My understanding is that git itself is decentralized insofar as each clone can develop its own history without ever needing to push to the origin, but that what OP is referring to is actually the “distributed” nature of git, where i.e. it’s easy to copy the entire history of an instance.
what OP is referring to is actually the “distributed” nature of git, where i.e. it’s easy to copy the entire history of an instance.
Exactly. Isn’t decentralized itself since it’s not a platform but by being “indipendent” and not entangled with anything you can just copy it entirely and host it somewhere else.
Isn’t decentralized itself since it’s not a platform
I think I see your definition of “decentralized” a little better now, if you only want to apply it to platforms.
I think your definition may be too strict, and that “decentralized” and “distributed don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but eh, that’s just my take.
I think if syncing of (at least) upstream histories between clones was done automatically, they might consider that more in-line with their definition of decentralized.
Also kudos to both of you for communicating your differences properly without resorting to arguments.
I feel like so much of the arguing and trolling nowadays is simply due to a difference in subjective definitions and people not being able to calmly communicate that with each other.
100% agree, when I see something I disagree with on its face I try to default to “I probably don’t get something they’re saying, given that it’s only a couple sentences of written word, and a different person’s brain who wrote them”.
It always makes for more useful conversation than defaulting to “ha what a dumbass”
Git being snapshot-based unlike other (better) VCSs require that patch order matter so often the easiest way to manage a project is to have some centralized authority since it is so, so easy to get merge conflicts without a central authority if trying to just distribute patches. It’s a lot easier to be decentralized without Git’s fundamental limitations.
What version control software in particular do you find better than git?
Your point about users often managing git projects via centralization is taken and valid. I was just pointing out that you don’t have to use git that way - different clones can separately develop their own features - so the earlier claim someone made that “git isn’t decentralized” is still wrong, imo.
How can I subscribe to the answer?
Darcs & Pijul are based on Patch Theory. https://darcs.net/Theory
Git is distributed but still centralized. D in DVCS is distributed. Downvoters likely have never used a non-Git VCS, let alone a non-snapshot-based VCS. But fanboys will fanboy.
Pijul & Darcs are based on Patch Theory which make the conflicts of different patch order a non-issue so long as the apply cleanly (such as working on different ports of the code base). Patch A then patch B ≡ patch B then patch A; this will be a needless merge conflict in Git since the order matters. (& no, Jujutsu isn’t the solution still shackled to the limitations of Git as a back-end while claiming to do what Pijul does—but doesn’t).
I think downvoters are just expressing disagreement with your opinion. Personally I don’t hate git but I wouldn’t call myself a “fanboy” either - I just don’t think “distributed” has to be mutually exclusive from “decentralized”, which is a term not rigorously defined in this context anyway.
But thanks for informing me about patch theory, that’s something I’ll probably make a small hobby out of studying.
Anyway it is a good habit to avoid github entirely
(when hosting a repo).FIFY
Yes but no, because I don’t want to not interact with a repo at all just because it’s on github for whatever reason (if there’s one).
But yes, I understand your feelings. Fuck M$
Git is decentralised by nature. It’s what allows mirroring the repo on other forges even when git repos are hosted on proprietary platforms like GitHub.
You can easily mirror GitHub to some other repo
Yup. I’ve done it myself when I switched to Gitlab. It’s really straightforward.
Git is decentralized, but the collaborative aspect is fully centralized.
I see. But still, GitHub isn’t the right place for precious code like this. The best would be to have a federated git forge, something like what the forgejo devs are working on.
I’m going to pirate a switch game and load it onto my steam deck in honour of Yuzu and Ryujinx.
Let’s create millions of copies of BOTW and delete them so Nintendo loses a few billion.
This kind of thing often has the opposite of the intended effect. People then host mirrors of the original repo, and the press brings more developers to the project.
This sort of action by Nintendo and other companies is so short sighted. Bad press, a legal battle they couldn’t actually win if it went to court, increased attention on the thing they’re trying to hinder, etc. Its a stupid decision made by business people who don’t know anything about tech, and who are disincentivized to care about the long term health of their brand.
I litterally had not heard of the emulator until now. Maybe I’ll have to compile it and give it a spin now.
Bad press, a legal battle they couldn’t actually win if it went to court
Those two seem like a stretch.
Emulation and emulators aren’t illegal. Yuzu for example got in trouble mostly for distributing tools for circumventing copy protection and dumping roms and not for the emulator itself.
But it doesn’t really matter as nobody has money to defend themselves against something like Nintendo. Here just even the threat of it was enough to get the Ryujinx devs to fold just in case.
Yes. Nintendo doesn’t need to ever win a lawsuit. If they simply bring it, they will win through having the deepest pockets.
This is clearly bad press, everyone reading this gets negative thoughts about Nintendo. We are all talking about how bad they are RIGHT NOW.
Nintendo would absolutely lose that legal battle. It’s well established that emulation is not a crime and nor is the development of emulators.
You already had negative thoughts about nintendo…so does that count? Most people won’t even see this…so I don’t think it’s much bad press.
As for legal battles…being sued is not really about committing crimes…you can lose legal battles while not doing anything illegal. I think Nintendo would likely win from simply pushing the devs into bankruptcy…
If it’s enough negative thoughts pile up, they’ll eventually breach a threshold where people avoid the company. I was looking forward to Metroid Prime 4, but I’m thinking of skipping it now.
Maybe…I think this is not even noise for most people.
As much as I disagree with what their doing, Nintendo content is vastly superior to other consoles/handhelds…so I’m forced to stick with them.
Yeeeah, Nintendo sucks.
And it sucks that, despite this not killing the distribution of Yuzu or Ryujinx forks it does make them less safe and reliable for users, as well as hindering ongoing development.
Ultimately, though, Nintendo is acting within their rights. Which is not an endorsement, it’s proof that modern copyright frameworks are broken and unfit for purpose in an online world. We need a refoundation of IP. Not to make everything freely accessible, necessarily, but to make it make sense online instead of having to rely on voluntary non-enforcement. I don’t care if it’s Youtube or emulation development, you should know if your project is legal and safe before you have lawyers showing up at your door with offers you can’t refuse.
They aren’t working within any rights. Emulator production is a legal right that Nintendo has neither the ability to bestow nor deny. It’s the founding legal rationale behind virtualization as a technology. This is the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to shut up - the forced relinquishing of your rights through threat of force, and it’s a little frightening to watch people suggest otherwise. This has played out in court and is settled law. Bleem! went BANKRUPT to secure a legal victory against SONY and establish that emulators are completely legal and there is no “gray area” about them, and you should be in less of a hurry to throw legal rights away because “Well, Nintendo said so…”
They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them. Based on how things have worked so far they’d lose, and I agreee with you that the inequality in that interaction is terrible and should be addressed.
On the Yuzu scenario it’s more relevant, because of the specific proprietary elements found in the emulator.
And then there’s Nintendo targeting emulation-based handhelds and streamers for featuring emulated footage of their first party games on Youtube videos, which falls directly under the mess that is copyright enforcement under Youtube and other social platforms.
In all of those cases, a clearer, more rules-based organization of IP that explicitly covers these scenarios would have helped people defend against Nintendo’s overreach, or at least have a clearer picture of what they can do about it. We can’t go on forever relying on custom, subjective judicial interpretation and non-enforcement. We’re way overdue on a rules-based agreement of what can and can’t be done with media online.
The worst part is… we kinda know. There is a custom-based baseline for it we’ve slowly acquired over time. It’s just not properly codified, it exists in EULAs and unspoken, unenforceable practices. It’s an amazing gap in what is a ridiculously massive cultural and economic segment. It’s crazy that we’re running on “do you feel lucky?” when it comes to deciding if a corporation claiming you can’t do a thing on the Internet that involves media. We need to know what we’re allowed to do so we can say “no” when predatory corporations like Nintendo show up to enforce rights they don’t have or shouldn’t have.
You’re incorrect. Creating an emulator is not illegal. Nintendo has the legal right to threaten to sue someone, but if you are threatening to sue for something that is not a crime, and you know that, and you do it anyway in the hopes of bankrupting them before the case settles, that’s not a legal proceeding, it’s extortion. I can threaten to sue you for cooking pancakes in your house, and while it’s technically ALLOWED for me to do that, it’s clearly and obviously not a case I would win, but if the threat of making your life hell is prominent enough, you might get forced into backing down, which is exactly what’s happening here.
They would absolutely NOT lose in court for creating an emulator. I cannot stress enough exactly how legal emulation is. It’s as legal as making your pancakes. The only way they would lose in court is if there is some EXTRA thing they’ve done that we don’t know about. If all they’ve done is create and distribute Ryujinx, there is absolutely NO way Nintendo would win a case in the US. This is settled law, and saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so, although it DOES embolden companies to bullshit developers with more bogus threats in the future.
He never said that creating an emulator was illegal. He said that Nintendo is legally in the clear to do what they did. In Yuzu’s case, Nintendo sued and both parties settled, and they reached an “agreement” with Ryujinx to take down its emulator.
As far as I’m aware, the Yuzu case isn’t settled law as it calls into question whether the use of dumped keys to “bypass” copy protections is legal under the DMCA. This question isn’t about emulation, even if it’s a step required for emulation to be possible.
Since there are many issues with copyright law right now, corporations have a free pass to bully people in a multitude of ways, and the Yuzu lawsuit and Ryujinx “agreement” are just new ways of doing the same thing. All OP is saying is that lawmakers need to re-create copyright and IP laws to make them more fair and make sense so that content creators and/or homebrew devs and/or fangame creators and/or emulator devs can do their work with a far less shaky legal foundation.
And Elon Musk was “legally in the clear” to sue a trade group into non-existence over the idea that companies deciding to boycott his site independently was collusion.
I am objecting loudly and powerfully to “legally in the clear” being equated with “acceptable” or “within the spirit of the law.”
Make no mistake. As far as we know, this is only legally in the clear because the developers are unable to fight it. That does NOT make Nintendo’s action correct. By LAW the developers are in the right, they simply cannot afford to defend themselves. If your claim is that it is technically legal to threaten to sue anybody you want, you are correct and also terrifyingly shortsighted. Inability of someone to defend their rights for financial reasons is a miscarriage of justice. Given the options of smugly pointing out the technical situation or ranting about the injustice, I’ll take the latter.
Let’s put it another way… You’re absolutely right. Nintendo is LEGALLY in the right to bully someone into submission using the threat of a lawsuit they cannot afford with overwhelming money. The legal system can’t touch them.
But that means the ONLY place where Nintendo will EVER face ANY kind of consequences is in the court of public opinion, so why on EARTH would your take on the situation be, “Oh well… nothing we can do.” It’s not much, but it’s the ONLY lever you have, and to relinquish it is fatalistic, shortsighted, and overall inconceivable as a strategy.
Where did I say “oh well, nothing we can do?” You’re literally tying random arguments to my name.
Nobody here made the argument that what is legal is exactly what is fair. Nobody here made the argument that Nintendo being overly litigious is a good thing. The only argument made is that copyright law is flawed because companies abuse it and that lawmakers need to fix it.
You’ve said that, but this doesn’t seem to be a copyright issue. As far as I know, Ryujinx used NONE of Nintendo’s proprietary material whatsoever. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
What I’m seeing isn’t an IP issue at all - it’s simple strong-arming.
The initial argument that started all of this chain was a statement that Nintendo was understandable in their legal action, and I took and STILL take issue with that.
“They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them.”
While this is TECHNICALLY true in the most literal sense of the word, it carries the implication that there is something justifiable at some level about the actions they’ve taken.
My response is it’s correct in only the most pedantic sense, THIS is the element I find egregious for how much it understates just how disgusting Nintendo’s actions are. This is nothing more than a mafia shakedown with lawyers instead of grunts, and to play it down like that is improper.
IP, copyright, shutting down streamers… all of this is a totally separate issue, and all of THAT activity is actually SUPPORTED by law.
Shutting down Ryujinx is on a massively different level. It’s neither a copyright issue OR a legality issue. It’s a direct strong-arming contrary to established law, and THAT is what this thread is about. There are other articles to discuss IP and content creators, which are a completely different issue with different repercussions.
I did not claim that creating an emulator is illegal. You don’t sue people for a crime, either. “Illegal” and “criminal” are different concepts, and making an emulator without tapping into proprietary assets is neither.
We don’t know what Nintendo used to threaten Ryujinx, so we don’t know how likely it is that they would have won. We do know the Yuzu guys messed up and gave them a better shot than in the other times they have failed at this exact play.
You are very mad at an argument nobody is making.
Perhaps. But I see a lot of hand rubbing and “oh welling” from people when this is a legitimate moment for anger at the precedence this sets. I understand the urge to make it make sense, but the fact is people either tacitly accepting this activity as reasonable or arguing about the red herring of whether the source code is still available to sit and rot with nobody touching it but shady scam artists, not only moves the bar on what what Nintendo and other companies see they can get away with, it has a chilling effect on future preservation efforts among the constantly shrinking pool of people skilled enough in low level development to do this kind of work.
I guess my point is, I’m seeing very few voices that are sufficiently concerned or angry enough about this event considering the far reaching consequences it’s going to have.
We shouldn’t in ANY way be normalizing this activity, and our reaction shouldn’t be “Of COURSE they did this.” Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after we just watched Boeing murder a half dozen of its whistleblowers and the most people did was make a few memes. We’re living in a literal dystopia, apparently.
Well, there are a couple of caveats to that. One is that it’s far from the first time an emulator has been taken down for similar reasons and it’s historically been pretty ineffective in the grand scheme, especially when alternative forks are available. “Far reaching consequences” is a bit of an overstatement, at least for those of us that went down into the Bleem! mines back in the day. There is a chance that you may be connecting things that aren’t that directly connected here.
The second is that you’re still misrepresenting people not acting out their annoyance the way you’d like with people not being annoyed. I’m not here defending Nintendo, this sucks. I’m here saying that I don’t want to shame Nintendo into the same awkward gray area Google as an intermediary and every other IP holder currently inhabits, I want actually effective regulation that protects legitimate content creators from IP abuse, including from predatory corporations. You are looking to perform outrage in a room of like-minded people, and I get that you want to vent, but it’s not particularly useful to get mad at people that agree with you for not being in your same emotional level while they do.
This is a fair point. I just get so sick of seeing the constant erosion of individual rights in the technology space due to apathy and under reactions, and it’s a more or less constant, ongoing slide to the point where moments like this become absolutely infuriating.
The maintainer of the Apple M1 branch said that they literally showed up to the lead dev’s home in Brazil in a comment on Reddit.
That’s a good cue to mention that I don’t know the specifics of how this would work in Brazil and how they impact the situation one way or the other. That said, my objections to the current arrangement of IP and copyright are fairly international.
What’s not reported is that they will create a new codeberg account under a fake name, fork, and continue development in a few months
Original dev almost certainly not, not if they have their real name which is likely.
Nintendo harasses people with private investigators and likely have a dossier on whoever they targeted that goes beyond just the project. Cheat on your wife? Have a questionable arrangement with your HOA about your garage? It’s all ammo against you.
Don’t use your real name, obviously.
In this age with PIs and lawyers, it can often be found, and emudevs probably don’t start thinking they will be facing down a giant corpo over a hobby project.
In this age where PIs have been replaced with Facebook scrapers and lawyers have been replaced with ChatGPT, it can more easily be hidden – especially if you use tools like Tor.
If you start the project intending to be untracable, yes.
Most software devs aren’t thinking of that. These things with emulators often start as a hobby.
Sure, that’s why you abandon it, make a public statement about closing shop (exactly like happens here) and then fork it under a new identity
Here is HurricanePootis pinned comment in the AUR.
So, I am going to pin this post.
For now, I am pointing this package to https://git.naxdy.org/Mirror/Ryujinx as it has tags, which is useful for this package.
I am against deleting this package, as with yuzu and citra, forks will arise and then these packages will be resurrected (sometimes by less skilled maintainers cough cough citra). Therefore, I am going to keep an eye out to see where Ryujinx development goes, and go on from there.
OK!
SAY IT WITH ME NOW!
WHEN I SAY “BARBARA” YOU SAY “STREISAND”!
READY?!
" BARBARA "
This does not apply to difficult projects like emulators.
E.g. suyu, a yuzu fork, does not seem to get much development. Most of the changes are build or documentation related. [1]
Those emulators will work fine for the currently supported games, but without new competent people (trying to stay anonymous), I don’t see how these emulators will improve.
Yeah, now that both of the main emulators have been shut down, it will be interesting to see how well people can run future high profile Switch games on PC. Mario & Luigi Brothership and Metroid Prime 4 come to mind.
“FUCK IP”
did I do it correctly?
Oh snap, we have to decentralize the hub
I mean, that’s been obvious since Microsoft bought it.
But this is really more about how emulator devs ought to accept that Nintendo is going to try to persecute them and start keeping themselves anonymous to avoid being ruined by lawsuits, even though what they’re doing is neither illegal nor unethical.
Have you heard of ForgeFed yet?
No but now I’m looking into it
Forgejo is already doing it
Is it anything like forgefed?
A “hub” implies centralization, no?
Not necessarily. Look at Lemmy instances for example. You could call each instance a hub, but the content is pretty much distributed.
Nintendo is not as stupid as you guys think, Yuzu forks that actually got some development like sudachi got targeted shortly after and was dmca’d too, nobody wants to work on something that’s going to get claimed in 3 months.
Just serve the code locally from a Gitea or Forgejo instance. Then let’s see how Ninty is going to DMCA that. Also, I’d love for someone to challenge the DMCA’s as copyright should not apply to an emulator that doesn’t use any original code and doesn’t come with ROM files.
Yeah, it’s why Nintendo got Yuzu through DRM circumvention since games are encrypted, if Ryujinx didn’t comply they would’ve just done the same.
But nothing is circumvented. People have to provide their own keys, right? It’s like suing GnuPG b/c it can decrypt stuff…
And that’s exactly what they did to Yuzu and they settled, nobody wants to test it.
IANAL, but from what I read regarding Yuzu / the title and prod keys / etc., is Nintendo’s argument is three-fold – the only way to obtain those keys is to use a tool that itself is a violation of the DMCA, use of those keys by an emulator to decrypt Nintendo’s protected content in a method outside of Nintendo’s authorized use is a violation of DMCA even if the keys aren’t provided in the emulator, and there is no legitimate use of those keys except to circumvent controls intended to protect copyright.
Therefore, by their argument, any emulator that can use those keys would effectively be subject to DMCA even if you had to bring your own keys, because unless the emulator only ran homebrew or completely decrypted content and had absolutely no decryption capabilities, you’d still be using the prod keys and title keys to decrypt content in violation of the DMCA in order to execute it. So, the tool that dumps the keys is a DMCA violation and any emulator that uses those keys to decrypt protected content in order to execute it is a DMCA violation, and Nintendo has a strong case that the actual keys themselves are only useful for making unauthorized copies of content that bypass the encryption that exists to prevent it.
It stands to reason that a clean-room developed Switch emulator that required all content it ran to be decrypted prior to being able to run it may be able to exist without Nintendo shitting it into non-existance, since Nintendo couldn’t make any argument that the primary use was a DMCA violation as no encryption would be being bypassed by the emulator. They’d probably then go after whoever made the tool to dump the games, but they’d probably be less successful.
On the other hand, the pragmatist in me says that unless I was 500% sure of my online anonymity, I wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Nintendo – even if I thought I was right. They have enough money to lock someone up in legal battles for a very long time and most independent developers wouldn’t have anywhere near the finances required to bankroll appropriate defense counsel. Can’t say I’d blame people for not wanting to invite that hellscape into their lives.
Thing is, DMCA doesn’t apply all over the world. There are countries where whatever electronic device you buy is actually yours and you’re allowed to do whatever you want - including messing with the firmware. Also, I’d argue, the DMCA doesn’t apply if you dump the firmware/keys for yourself only without distributing it.
That being said, it’s unfortunate that these people are mostly in the US where the party with more money decides when a lawsuit is over and not some sane judge that just throws this case back at Nintendo. But after the stuff with Disney+ and the recent one with Uber, I’m not surprised at all anymore.
Ryujinx does not include DRM circumvention.
Oh yeah? What’s the key files for then?
They gave out keyfiles? Is that what you are saying?
No Nintendo is saying that anything using the key files is illegal
Oh well then it’s good then that the software doesn’t have keyfiles in it, and plays unsigned and self-signed homebrew and switch software just fine.
You can’t serve a DMCA to an account named Joe Doe with no contact info.
But you can serve it to any public git and they will serve it to you.
How? Literally how will they contact you?
They served it to github and github removed it, it’s that simple.
Use codeberg. Or you could self host it and just not provide contact info.
Nintendo youll never get my money cuz you wont me play yer great games on my own hardware. Ill never spend another dime on your designed to fail overpriced crappy controllers. Never! Boooooo!
Never give Nintendo money.
Wait! So the author bows his head, says hey great guys u win. Watch i complied.
Leans over to the stranger sitting next to him and says, hold my beer.
In the same heartbeat, creates another git acnt, exact same commit history. And carries on. Some other author, totally not the same guy but oddly the same pgp public key announces they’ve taken over and here are the new urls.
i call that mission accomplished
this comment thread is like fight Money Mcbags and go bankrupt for our entertainment and for the LOLs and feelz good?
Or we can just post the new urls and pretend it’s a new maintainer, with the handle lawyerdisappointed
What are you even talking about, I was on their discord when I saw this and saw no links to a new version.
Source?
did he just out passive aggressive the Japanese?
Nintendo hates fun. Pass it on.
Nintendo hates fun that isn’t THEIR fun.
Repackaging old games for new consoles is basically the entire business model for Nintendo at this point. In light of that, I can see why they go after emulators so hard.
Parts of old games.
