Ryujinx has been taken down after an agreement between the developer gdkchan and Nintendo

Jack Sparrow@sh.itjust.works to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 204 points –
gbatemp.net

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.

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Someday we’ll learn that GitHub just isn’t the place for this kind of stuff…

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.

I agree with your second paragraph, but you do know there are plenty of good alternatives to Github right?

And they change nothing? It still boils down to human beings being liable.

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

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.

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

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

So an alternative will pop up right? At this point pirating nintendo games is a moral obligation

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.

It's Nintendo practically daring people to do it.

And they will.

"What are you gonna do, stab me?"

  • Quote from man stabbed

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.

A federated github might solve this right?

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.

I am not super knowledgeable about crypto but I thought Monero was untraceable? All the privacy-focused services I've seen allow you to pay by Monero. A few accept cash by envelope too.

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.

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

They should just release torrents of the releases and that way even if there is a takedown the community keeps seeding.

If we keep using the current version and it never gets any updates, will it keep running the whole Switch game library.

Mostly, probably.

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.

... That's my guess.

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

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.

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

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.

Well, I for sure wouldn't gamble my life for some emulator even if I lived in Brazil (Pretty sure it was Brazil).

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

C&Ds are essentially free though.

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.

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.

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

Someone will take his place and continue the work. Someone who is more robust and has a will to not cater to such dumb demands.

as of now, nobody took the place of yuzu devs, for example

suyu (the most famous yuzu fork) got just 50 commits in the last 6 months and are almost all of them are tiny changes to the readme where they only change the discord link or just memes

Yah sure keep thinking that. Hasn’t happened for the other emulator taken down.

It may happen once the Switch has reached its end-of-life. There would be less chance of N going after someone if their console is dead.

No, not impossible. I know they went after the melee community. But whoever picks up the torch would have less of a crosshair on their back at that point in time.

Man you're so defeatist. Do you dare call yourself a pirate still with that kind of mentality? If so, please excuse yourself by not representing of being a part of the pirate community.

Because we don't have time or patience for that shit. Things shut down all the time, but things also come back. People within rank will pick up what's been left behind. The only people dumb enough to say the shit you've said, are simply just leechers. Leechers who take and take but give nothing back. You're nothing.

seems like there have been multiple contributors. so many clones of the repo....

Need to do something! As for YouTube and ad-blockers