Suyu: A Nintendo Switch emulator for hardware preservation and research | Hacker News Reader

Suyu: A Nintendo Switch emulator for hardware preservation and research

suyu.dev

57 pointstodsacerdoti25 comments

> suyu, pronounced "sue-you" (wink wink) is the continuation of the world's most popular, open-source, Nintendo Switch emulator, yuzu.

[1] https://gitlab.com/suyu-emu/suyu

So far they haven't actually done anything except enable features that the Yuzu team built but hadn’t yet shipped. The lead of the project also isn’t a developer. So far it’s a lot more hype than reality from my view. So I’m holding out for another option.

While it is light on actual emulation improvement, they did do a lot of infrastructure updates especially modifications towards resources that are no longer available.

I don't know if this will be the winning fork in the end, but I agree it is certainly the most "hyped" so I hope that publicity is not for nothing.

While it is often not ideal to have a non-dev in charge, I am going to try to hold off on too much judgment and hope for the best until things sort themselves out, they did at least take action.

Which features?

Love it, abandonware and walled gardens seem so short sighted.

So, did Nintendo manage to retroactively gain copyright on all the source code files? If they did, then older open source copies are infringing.

Nintendo can somehow retract the open source license that was previously issued? That doesn't make sense to me.

AIUI, gratuitous licenses are revocable at will in general in US law (if the standards for a contract rather than gratuitous license exist, things are different); the effect of revocation of a gratuitous license on parties that have expended resources in reliance on a promise of non-revocation may be limited by the doctrine of promissory estoppel, but even where such a limitation is found appropriate, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the revocation will have no effect and unlimited future use will be allowed.

It's central to open source that licenses can't be revoked - if they could, then accepting contributions from external developers would be a hazard (they could withdraw their contributions and then you would need to get rid of their code)

> It’s central to open source that licenses can’t be revoked

That…doesn’t change the underlying law.

> if they could, then accepting contributions from external developers would be a hazard

Accepting code from external developers under a gratuitous license is a hazard (given promissory estoppel, probably a fairly limited one, but still something of a hazard); that is one of the reasons that some projects, even if they offer code in a way which is likely a gratuitous license, require individual license contracts before incorporating third-party code.

(Of course, there is still a hazard – the third party offering code might misrepresent their ownership of it, or despite copyright ownership might have violated a software patent, or… mitigating all hazards isn’t possible and individual projects decide their own risk tolerance.)

> gratuitous license

What does this mean?

Also.. do you have any references?

> What does this mean?

I'm wondering the same. Perhaps something got lost in a double-translation? i.e. free -> <something in another language> -> gratuitous

IIUC it means a license that's granted without the consideration that would usually be required for a contract. I think that's approximately what'd be meant by a "free license" in ordinary English, with no extra connection to "Free Software". The references I'm finding are about physical property, though.

> What does this mean?

A license that is not part of a contract (usually, because of the absence of mutual consideration.)

That's exactly what is precedented, that is to say, exactly that has happened many times in history already.

Do you have a link? Any reference?

There are billion dollar business whose existence would be threatened if someone did this..

I remember it happened with Bukkit once but I don't know a good search engine with which I could actually search for a link.

But what about the case of single-entity repos?

I feel like Nintendo would own the source from a particular snapshot, kind of like how certain projects close their code.

Nintendo doesn't have copyright to this code in any way. There are secrets which they may claim to own, but the emulator itself is completely independent. (unless of course we learn it was stolen in some way, but that's not what Nintendo claimed)

Yuzu agreed to hand over ownership of their domains etc. to Nintendo, I believe OP is speculating that includes the code they wrote.

Even if ownership of the code is handed over (i.e. copyright is transferred) to Nintendo, that doesn't change the license applied to code that's been published.

Even if the work done by the new group isn't much, I'd support whoever stand up to companies like Nintendo.

Hey, we're going to maintain a fork of a repo we have no experience with!

Did the owners of that repo say it? Or do you know their experience personally? Even if it's true - if nobody more experienced steps up, what's the problem with someone learning on the job? We can wait with the criticism until there's actually something to complain about.

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