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by lmm 843 days ago
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Nintendo caught using an open source emulator for the switch, without any sort of credit to the authors after suing?

Majesco Entertainment published some switch games made by Mistic Software, which used an open source emulator without credit and in violation of its license (and therefore were infringing copyright). Atari was somehow involved as well. Nintendo had no involvement, unless you consider them responsible for not doing a thorough enough license audit of every company that publishes Switch games or something.
1 comments
Aissen 842 days ago
> unless you consider them responsible for not doing a thorough enough license audit of every company that publishes Switch games or something.

That's the thing with closed platform, you can't have your cake and it too.

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globular-toast 842 days ago
They can if software is licensed under MIT or a similar "permissive" licence. In this case the software was correctly licensed under GPL, though.
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hn_acker 842 days ago
Nintendo was not involved. Mistic Software ported Windows/Mac computer games to Wii using ScummVM, a virtual machine program under the GPL 2.0 or later license at the time (now 3.0 or later), without crediting the ScummVM team [1]:

> In December 2008, the ScummVM team learned that the recently released Wii ports of three Humongous Entertainment Junior Adventure titles, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside, and Spy Fox: Dry Cereal, have all used the ScummVM engine without proper attribution. The games were published on request of Atari through Majesco Entertainment, who turned to Mistic Software to port the games. Mistic had used ScummVM for these, but failed to credit the developers. While the ScummVM team contacted gpl-violations.org for legal advice, Atari instead threatened to sue the ScummVM team, as the terms of Nintendo Wii development kit heavily restricted the use of open source software, including the GPL. A settlement was made in 2009, in which ScummVM would drop the investigation of the GPL violation, on the condition that Mistic would sell or destroy all GPL-violating copies of the games, make a donation to the Free Software Foundation, and pay the legal fees. As a result, this legal dispute significantly limited the availability of the Wii ports of these three titles.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScummVM#Mistic's_GPL_violation...

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