According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.
Closed source "I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit" hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?
Also: it isn't like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the "hey, stop it or we'll turn you into indentured servants" letters.
In the meantime, anyone got a backup of the sourcecode & the binaries for win/linux?
When it was clear Yuzu was on its way out, I took out a backup and saved it in my personal server to share around with friends who asked, but Ryujinx disappeared without an announcement, so I didn't get a chance to do that.
EDIT: Managed to find a backup of the source from just a few hours ago and save it to my own server. Guess I'll have to compile it on my own if I want to share binaries with people who ask :P
There are only so many programmers who are good enough to create an emulator, and a lot of them are already doing other projects. The Switch is also a very complicated system, and it needs a small team to pull it off.
I'm not so sure. It's possible Nintendo opted for a carrot rather than a stick in this case.
This doesn't seem to have been started with a public C&D letter like usual. Yuzu (the previous Switch emulator that was taken down) incorporated some proprietary Nintendo information, which is why Nintendo had a legal lever against them. They don't have one in this case, yet it still came down. Plus, everything seems to be have been going on very quiet behind the scenes.
If you were an emulator writer and Nintendo came and offered you life changing money in exchange for ending the project, would you take it? I would have a very hard time turning that down. Nintendo also doesn't want a flood of yokels trying to start the project up again hoping to receive the same offer; most would fail, but one or two might take off. Better to let the threat be implied.
This is just speculation, of course, but something about the way this has unfolded feels a little different.
C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn't going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.
At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But... just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don't mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.
At least with radicle all the forks will still exist even if the authoritative copy is taken down. And even then I think because radicle is like BitTorrent, anybody who pinned the main repo would still be seeding it so it would be very hard to scrub it completely. The main challenge in using radicle is getting an active contributor with some reputation to maintain their copy on there. Otherwise there's no momentum and nobody will pin the countless mirrors published by randos.
I would expect the legal teams to slow down once the switch becomes obsolete. (Like the SNES, GCN, etc.) At that point some other group will take up the mantle and patch whatever is broken.
Good fucking luck, the hardware will likely be a 2022 tablet if the switch is anything to go off of. Considering as well the console will likely have similar architecture, and switch emulators already exist, I'd give it about 3 months.