Switch emulator Ryujinx shuts down development after “contact by Nintendo”
Switch emulator Ryujinx shuts down development after “contact by Nintendo”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Nintendo hates fun. Pass it on.
Nintendo hates fun that isn’t THEIR fun.
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?
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.
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).
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.
FIFY
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
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.