https://github.com/Xeeynamo/sotn-decomp/pull/1565This project is a decompilation of the PS1 game Symphony of the Night. The goal is to produce a bit-for-bit matching output of the entire multi-megabyte binary. Apparently the people working on it are afraid that their work will be stolen by other people. They also forced through the license without consulting with many of the contributors.Thoughts?
people obsessed with getting credit in autism works? boringpeople obsessed with shielding their autism works for fear that the man is going to SHUT IT ALL DOWN? neuroticI don't really know or care which camp this falls into. I seriously doubt SotN decompiles are standing there expecting to get paid for anyone using their work (derived from someone else's work), but if they are, lolno
>>102280820Just from skimming that thread, they seem to be dealing with this responsibly. They're careful not to relicense code that they didn't contribute or to step on the toes of any of their contributors.Are they licensing decompiled code with this change? I'd be surprised if Konami doesn't take exception to this if so.
>>102280820That's a good thread. No bullshit and right to what matters.Decomps I think are a gray legal mess so I hope the project goes well
>>102280913>>102281073>Just from skimming that thread, they seem to be dealing with this responsibly.I checked their Discord and apparently they banned contributors that were against the change. So they probably can't even post a comment if they wanted to.>Are they licensing decompiled code with this change?Yes. No other decomp has has been stupid enough to do such a thing.>Decomps I think are a gray legal messOf course. A matching decomp is no different of a transformation than, say, zipping a file up. You apply a tool to it and get the original copyrighted content back out. There's zero legality to any of this and other decomps haven't been so stupid as to apply a license to decomped code.
>>102280820AGPLv3 is genuinely a better license choice for this. The fuck is the point of the thread even?
>NOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CANT USE A COPYLEFT LICENSE! YOU MUST USE A PERMISSIVE ONE! THINK OF ALL THE CORPOS YOU'RE FUCKING OVER THAT MIGHT WANT TO USE YOUR DECOOOOOMP!
>>102280820I don't think relicensing existing code works like that.
>>102280873That one russian portable game console using a russian cpu includes a decompiled version of the gta renderware engine to run gta 3 and gta vice city.But that is much more useful than a PS1 game that can just be emulated anyway.And the kind of people who would ship decompiled games (like the Russians) don't exactly care about copyright, since they would have to ship all the proprietary assets anyway for the game to be playable.Changing the license may or may not be illegal depending on what the license was previously. If it was modified BSD for example, then it's legal. If it was just the plain GPL3 I'm not sure.
>>102281216Actually my post was mistaken, the GTA code I was talked about wasn't decompiled, it was reverse engineered. Reverse engineering is legal (like in Wine), at least if it is clean room (not looking at the binary code from the original, only at the input and output formats and behavior), decompilation is not.
>>102280820>Code piratesWay to front load your thread anon ya cuntDecompiling is completely legal, and not even a legal grey area thing. Reverse engineering is done REGULARLY across industries.
>>102281181It literally does. A team can relisense anything as long as people sign off on it, and those who don't do have to have their code removed and rewritten clean under the new license. How do you think BSD came to be from AT&T Unix?
>>102281244Decompiling and writing code to recreate that IS reverse engineering anon.
>>102280873tbf credit is all they have. SoundCloud at least pays rappers while they throw shit at the wall hoping to make it in the music industry, GitHub commiters do it for FREE.
>>102281073They're not legally gray. Decompilation is fully legal in EU.
>>102281299>GitHub commiters do it for FREE.They do it for the sum of the team's output...If you have 20 people all doing 5% of the total effort of a project, then you receive 95% of other's effort for _FREE_ when it is compleated.
>>102281439>Rent's due, man, pay up>Can I pay you in FOSS project?
>>102281457
>>102281073>Decomps I think are a gray legalno they aren't
Decompress are the great thing we have left. This is what makes digital corpos shiver in their boots.
>>102281933Decomps *
>>102281138Except for the slight problem of trying to relicense code you arguably don't actually own.
>>102281283But not the legal kind of reverse engineering. The only legal way to do it is clean room reverse engineering which means you can only look at the inputs and outputs produced by the code, or at a spec produced by someone else who looked at the code, but you can't just look at the disassembled or decompiled code itself and just copy the actual code.>>102281402But not releasing a derivative work based on that decompiled work, that's still illegal.
