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GBA Emulator Creators Vow To Take On Nintendo
Justin Nolan writes "According to a PDALive article, Kyle Poole of Crimson Fire Entertainment has decided to take on Nintendo after their legal threats regarding his Zodiac Tapwave-based Game Boy Advance emulator, Firestorm gbaZ. The following post can be found in his forum: 'We believe that the US Patent No 6,672,963 does not apply to Firestorm gbaZ, as the patent clearly covers optimizing an emulator based on detecting a predetermined video game title... Because of this, we have decided that we will release the emulator early next week as a free open source project, covered by the GPL license. We will of course provide a compiled version for you to use, but the full source code will also be available. This will provide us further legal protection, as we will not be profiting from it.'"
They got what they paid for -- a Gameboy Advance emulator.
The fact that some other people get it for free doesn't change the fact that they evaluated what something was worth to them and made the choice to buy it.
Biblical parables are not all that popular on Slashdot, but the workers in the vinyard really does illustrate this point nicely. Humans have this weird psychological quirk where they measure what they have very directly by what their peer is getting.
May we never see th
It's still possible to make a profit, just indirectly. The GPL doesn't mandate releasing associated data files with programs.
I've never figured out why emulator groups were always so rabid about keeping their emulators closed-source -- they are tinkerers, systems people, reverse engineerers, and seem like *exactly* the kind of people that fit into the open source world. Yet emulators stayed closed source for the longest time, with much duplication of effort and people screaming that people stole code from them...ack. How many people have really made a decent sum of money from writing a console emulator? Given the number of closed-source projects out there, probably not many...
It is nice to see this open-sourced, though. Since VisualBoyAdvance is also GPLed, perhaps the two projects could share effort to some degree.
May we never see th
"Because of this, we have decided that we will release the emulator early next week as a free open source project, covered by the GPL license. We will of course provide a compiled version for you to use, but the full source code will also be available. This will provide us further legal protection, as we will not be profiting from it"
Brilliant move. I'd have more respect for these guys if they started it as an Open Source project to begin with. Now they're just being asses. What they should have done instead is marketed it as a development tool.
Let me give you all a piece of advice: Don't use Open Source to advocate (either directly or indirectly like in this case) piracy. You don't want corps like Nintendo burned by actions like this. How do you really think other software development houses are going to see it?
"Derp de derp."
In that case, there go your legal defense funds...
Seriously: how the bloody hell will these guys be able to defend themselves against Nintendo without any money?
Goo goo g'joob.
I can't imagine a better way to fuck oneself. Not only are they going to kill themselves off, they're going to hurt Open Source in the process.
--Moo.
I remember Sony buying VGS after getting the circuit court to add to the body of case law favoring emulation, yes.