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.
The agreement: You agree to take it down and we agree not to take your house and 30% of your salary until you die.
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.
“Agreement” is quite a fucking twist on “threat.”
Sigh…
Just had to find about it here https://youtu.be/XrRlL7_coh0
Someday we’ll learn that GitHub just isn’t the place for this kind of stuff…
GitHub has nothing to do with this. All the information we have is that the dev himself took everything down after an agreement with Nintendo.
What is the alternative?
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.
GitFlic in Russia. Good luck telling them to get rid of something
It’s where Bypass paywall clean browser extension went after the DMCA bullshut
There is a p2p one called https://radicle.xyz/
I agree with your second paragraph, but you do know there are plenty of good alternatives to Github right?
A federated github might solve this right?
No, but a gitea/forgejo instance as a hidden service might.
One of yuzu’s forks went that path: http://vub63vv26q6v27xzv2dtcd25xumubshogm67yrpaz2rculqxs7jlfqad.onion/torzu-emu/torzu
NOT publish releases
Well there goes that one for most people
Nope.
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.
Hosting a git instance with Njala?
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.
Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.
kyun.host is mullvad-like insofar as your account is identified by a random account ID and they dont necessarily have an email etc on you (you can provide one so they can contact you if you want but that’s optional). Have not used their services myself but I’m aware of them.
Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.
But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.
That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.
Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.
The problem is that people tend to mistake being private to being above the law. You can argue against what law enforcement decides is a crime, but that matters little to service and providers and it’s a another type of discussion
Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.
seems like there have been multiple contributors. so many clones of the repo…
deleted by creator
gdkchan? Who’s that person? My username is gdkchan2 but it’s purely a coincidence
Main hassle is to set up the disposable bank accounts in tax havens
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.
What was the final build? I have 1.1.1402 on my PC.
I think you might have the latest. The flatpak version that is currently on my machine is 1.1.1397 – But the source I just grabbed and didn’t build is more recent.
EDIT: The flathub build is still up – For now. I pulled the latest update from there. It was 1.1.1403
Thanks, i git cloned from here as a backup.
For anyone looking, someone Archive.org’d the final Win x64 compiled version:
Fuck
Nintendo’s real intent is doubtless to try and ensure that nobody ever makes a functional emulator for the upcoming Switch 2.
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.
Need to do something! As for YouTube and ad-blockers
Damn, I just got a mac and it has replaced my switch thanks to this brilliant software
they probably would have been fine if they weren’t shown as being used to play the leaked echos of wisdom…
Don’t think so, one day it would be shutdowned by Nintendo
People please try using https://radicle.xyz/ for hosting source code. I haven’t used it but the idea of it sounds pretty cool
The dev got bribed (or threatened) by Nintendo to manually delete the repo. GitHub this time didn’t do anything
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.
Lol, why do you think payment is the more likely of the two options?
Why the hell would Nintendo pay them anything when a C&D is cheaper and just as effective.
Money Talks, Bullshit Walks.
Until now the stance was “rofl in Brazil C&Ds are a waste of money”, so the bribe option makes sense.
Suppose that they calculate $1 million in legal costs in order to take the case to a court, then offering something like $200k to delete the repo is a big saving.
The dev of simple mobile apps sold millions of users to an ad company for just $30k which was almost pennies if we think how popular those apps were in the Foss community
Now, backups of the code are widely available, will the development continue without the main dev? Suyu (fork of yuzu) made almost no progress since the fork
As I understand it, cause of the country the creator is from, a C&D was unlikely to be enforceable. Money, on the other hand, is a universal language.
C&D in Brazil stands for Comedy & Despair, where you’re the one laughing at the company desperate to get you to do what they want without having any actual legal leverage
I this is the more probable version of events.
C&Ds are generally just threats to take someone to court. They aren’t themselves enforceable.
Even I can send C&Ds if I want but I don’t have anything to back them up with. Nintendo on the other hand absolutely does.
By “enforceable,” I meant, “the reasonable legal means to follow up”.
So you wouldn’t comply with Nintendo in a similar position?
I would, but I live in a country that cares about IP laws.
