Toward the end of April, the Wii Homebrew Channel – an essential tool for anybody who’s ever modded their Wii – ceased development and had its GitHub repository archived. With accusations of stolen Nintendo code flying around, it seemed like there might be some genuine danger for the future of Wii modding, but for those outside of the community these allegations might be less relevant than they first appear.
A readme from developer marcan accompanied the archival of the Homebrew Channel, accusing libogc, a development toolkit for Wii and GameCube which the Homebrew Channel is built on, of using code from an illegally leaked Nintendo development kit.
That might seem like the core of the story, but importantly, those accusations have been floating around for decades. The new allegation in that statement was that libogc was also using code stolen from an open-source tool called RTEMS. How do you steal code from software that’s open-source? By failing to give proper credit to its original developers, which is what libogc was accused of doing.
At least one libogc developer came forward to argue against the idea that any RTEMS code was stolen, but this past week, the RTEMS team itself said it had come “to the conclusion that sufficient evidence exists pointing to a systematic effort to copy source code from RTEMS (roughly version 4.5 to 4.6) with removal of attribution and licensing information.”
libogc forms the basis of pretty much any homebrew software developed for GameCube and Wii, and what effect this might have on the future of homebrew development remains to be seen. But for the Wii Homebrew Channel itself, which started this whole thing in the first place, the issue is effectively moot.
The Wii Homebrew Channel is pretty much complete as is, and hadn’t received a meaningful update in years, even before it was archived. If you’ve got a Wii that needs a hack laying around, the process is going to remain the same for the foreseeable future. Those inside the community will have to figure out for themselves what this all means going forward, but for the retro enthusiasts outside of it, it’s business as usual.
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