Libogc accused of stealing RTEMS threading implementation without attribution

General
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Happy Saturday!

I’m a developer in the field of aerospace, and I’ve interacted with Joel on several occasions at various industry events. I saw some news in the videogame homebrew community that directly involves RTEMS that I thought that Joel and the RTEMS community might want to know about.

Essentially, the Wii Homebrew Channel has closed itself down. They have done so because one of their dependencies, libogc, is accused of stealing an old RTEMS threading implementation, obscuring where the code came from, and removing all attributions to the RTEMS project.

I haven’t seen any discussion of this on the forums, so I’m not entirely sure if the RTEMS project is aware of (or cares about) this – likely because of just how far away Wii hacking is from the RTEMS intended usecase.

Here’s a github repository from one of the Wii Homebrew Channel’s users that tries to bring the alleged theft to light:

And here’s a post from the Wii Homebrew channel about it:

There’s a lot of back and forth regarding “Did they steal from RTEMS”? or did they not?

I haven’t seen RTEMS itself weigh in on this, if they even care to do so.

I just thought I’d share. Maybe you care to weigh in, maybe you don’t.

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There is a news item on the topic … RTEMS DevKitPro/LibOGC Copying Of Code Without Attribution

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Its rather unfortunate as they could have written RTEMS BSPs and just used that as the foundation. The. Used our normal tools, network stack, file systems, libraries. etc and gotten improvements as things evolved. That would have let them avoid having to reinvent/copy the pieces

Open source is a great way to share responsibility and maintenance while achieving everyone’s goals