Wii Homebrew Community "Built On Lies And Copyright Infringement"

It hasn't received an official release in almost 10 years, so who cares. It probably has been feature complete longer than that, on a console that at this point is almost twice as old with a miniscule community.

Like "It's the HOMEBREW channel. Not to be used for playing copyrighted software."? I mean, I appreciate that they want to play fair with other open source projects and developers, but isn't the entire emulation community essentially "built on lies and copyright infringement"?

Ok so, i might be late to all this as i was helping with the damage control. But let me get some facts straight out in the open. Yes this is part of the damage control im doing, but its to battle a lot of misinformation out there. So, lets get into it.

First things first, marcan is wrong. Libogc ( the library homebrew is built upon )'s threading is not rtems. As youll see later, it was inspired by it, but not even close as to a copy paste or plagiarised when it was first made. Shagkur (the one who made lwp) is known to have created some stuff by looking at other stuff and writing code from the ideas. This was asked to shagkur when we were first made aware of the allegations 2 years ago

Dkp didnt make this public as they did not feel like it was necessary.
Its only now that marcan made a fuss about it and it blew up that we have to battle this.

There is also the fact that libogc is 23 fucking years old. It was made by shagkur in 2003, before git or svn existed and before forums and social media was a thing. So you shouldnt put it up to todays standards either. On top of it, that was made for gamecube, not wii. Marcan was part of the migration to wii so he was part of it too.

I also want to point out that he shouldnt be making a fuss as his mini code, a code base what their bootmii and installer is build upon, contains code that looks very similar to ios, the nintendo code running on the security processor.

Anyway, there is more. Yes people have found similarities, but thats because of how things work, not because of copy pasta. I would like to redirect your attention to this blogpost and investigation by mardy : https://mardy.it/blog/2025/04/no-libogc-did-not-steal-rtems-code.html

Inline edit about the blog: i want to point out the lwp code also evolved over time to fit newlib better and to integrate standard c/c++ code better. But lets keep going, shall we?

Im not going to deny that parts of libogc are semi decompilations of the then leaked gamecube sdk. devkitPro didnt know this untill years after it had integrated libogc into its systems. But by then it was wildly used so there was no going back. Rewriting it would also not have been feasible to do alone. Hence the state it is in now. But as far as the new lwp allegations, its all false.

Also, and this is my personal thing, hbc archiving their repo was a pure dick move. They didnt do anything with it anymore, they didnt merge or accept improvements nor did they want to release a new version that would have fixed some stuff for wiiu/vwii. Its was considered dead by the community ages ago...

I see the headline and think "sooooo...?"

I read the article and I'm left continuing with the same question... They're trying to say that it's built on a library full of Nintendo code.

Whoop-de-fuck... Other than Nintendo, who cares? Why care? Libraries, SDKs, and drivers SHOULD be free and open source.

FOSS Community Tries To Go A Single Day Without Controversy and Drama Challenge: Impossible

I find this particularly funny, because the scene for Wii homebrew felt like the wild west for a decent while. There were many different iOS (think kind of like drivers, you'd install ones with patches applied so you could run non-nintendo code) installers that were almost all doing the exact same thing. Multiple loaders to run ISOs off USB drives. A couple of games leaked early. I remember playing Skyward Sword with a friend a few days early.

There were a small few that tried to enforce not being able to use their homebrew apps for piracy, but they were largely derided for it. Riivolution was a groundbreaking app for arbitrarily replacing game files on the fly, but it had numerous things built in to prevent people from using it on anything but real discs. There was a decent amount of drama around that.

Smash Bros Brawl mods were fucking amazing. There just wasn't much like that on consoles before then.

What a dramatic headline

"The authors of libog 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," continues the statement. "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."

It is claimed that the 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" and that when the team behind The Homebrew Channel filed an issue on Github, it was "immediately closed" and met with "verbal abuse" before being "completely deleted from public view."

Whelp, they’re lucky Nintendo didn’t care enough. Wondering what prompted this?

Yes, and?

I used the homebrew channel to convert my Wii from Japanese to North American (games are region-locked). Never used it for posted games.

Ahh, that brings me back. I can still remember the startup music.

The DS was my first console I played pirated games on and the Wii was the second, followed by the PSP, 3DS, and Switch. I remember I chose to jailbreak the Wii specifically because of Xenoblade Chronicles not getting a NA release (originally). Come to think of it, I played Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition on my Switch recently. Full circle!

For me it was built on hopes and dreams