I am sure you saw the news post item about certain GPL violation.

Let me present here some more details about the case.



Disclaimer

Fingolfin and cyx are bound by the agreement signed by the lawyers. They are not allowed to talk about the case. Other developers are not, and there is pretty handful of them who know at least beginning of the situation. We are not happy about the outcome, cyx and Fingolfin included.


Short story

As you may imagine, we are closely watching the market for ScummVM-supported games. One of the main reasons is provide an up to date information on our Where to buy games list. Thus, we were pretty glad and interested to hear that there are upcoming Humongous Entertainment titles on Wii. Thus, as soon as the games were on sale, couple of developers bought them.

Suddenly something quite unexpected happened. I got 2 independent reports from 2 completely different sources, even from different countries that apparently there is ScummVM inside. I was not surprised by the fact of ScummVM usage, as there are already Revolution games and GOG.com who sell ScummVM as part of their distributions, still a surprise was that there were the SCUMM-based games. Thus, I quickly requested to inspect the box for copyright statements, and as such, there came a surprise.

Clearly, it was a violation. Further inspection showed that it was even a blatant violation. I addressed to my friend, google.com search engine, and I found following facts:

Apparently Atari contracted porting work to their long time partner, Majesco Entertainment.

Majesco Entertainment in turn subcontracted the work to Mistic Software, a Canadian-based game shop

Mistic Software has its development office in Chernigov, Ukraine, locally presented as Mistic Soft LLC who did the actual work



These Mistic Soft guys got the game assets and sources (this is obvious from the fact that they were able to insert their names into game credits seamlessly), but instead of performing actual work they went a cheap way.

Inspection of the game binary (we dumped it on SD Card on Wii with homebrew channel, it's pretty small) showed that they based their work on ScummVM 0.9.0, inside there were full credits to ScummVM Team (with couple placeholders for their names, though they left them empty), as well as such goodness as "This might be broken -- please report where you encountered this to Fingolfin" or "Tell sev how to reproduce it". Judging from the symbol names they rolled out their own backend, and used Nintendo tools for that.

Then we performed some playtesting on the real thing in order to find clues that ScummVM is inside. Pretty fast we found a 0.9.0-era bug in Freddi Fish. Let me demonstrate it:



Note that gfx glitch on Freddi's left eye. It is right at the beginning of the game, when Freddi reads a letter from the bottle, and is easy to spot on the console. There could be other bugs, but that was enough. Now this bug is fixed in ScummVM.


The development


We were quite shocked. It looks like Mistic Soft took money for all the porting efforts but instead of that just stacked together a ScummVM build! Of course, it was easier (my estimate, that it requires about 2 full time weeks to port ScummVM to new platform), since as I suspect, original interpreter is not very alignment-safe and is not endianness-agnostic as ScummVM is.

Thus, we started to discuss what should we do with the case, and decided to approach gpl-violations.org. We got a lawyer which specializes on such violations, and pretty soon we sent a letter to Atari in Germany (the fact that the games being sold in Germany eased the work considerably).

First they started to deny everything. This is a pretty common thing among the lawyers, and also as I understand, they were not aware of the issue. Consider this: These programmers from Mistic Soft just provided the binaries to their Quality Assurance department, and the games worked well (as ScummVM does). They found no bugs, passed the work to Majesco, and those reported about successful project completion to Atari. Of course nobody except the developers (and perhaps their immediate managers) knew whose code is in there.

So, first Atari lawyers thought that we are going to sue them for zillions of Euros, and they prepared well for the fight. Once they got to know that only thing we are demanding is stick to GPL, they relaxed and the negotiations went much better.

We discussed that they could put stickers on those games which are being sold, and put ScummVM copyrights on new prints, mention us on their site. And it was really nice at first, but pretty soon the lawyers found that Nintendo explicitely prohibits use of open source software together with their Wii SDK, and as such it was a big fault from Atari side.

Thus, instead of being nice they decided to go and hit us badly.

At this very point let me go a bit astray and explain some things about ScummVM. ScummVM is a collection of game engines. There are two major categories of them. Part of the

Sorry for the slow updates. I've had to deal with lots of unexpected trouble during testing of dual-boot, plus school finished recently and thus my two daughters require more attention.

I appreciate your support very much and I know you're all holding your breath for the dual-boot functionality, so, please excuse me for the delay.

This is what's been done:

Dual boot code has been moved from U-Boot to the SPL: removes tiny delay introduced when booting the original firmware.
LCD support implemented both in SPL and U-Boot (both ILI9325 and ILI9331). The LCD now goes live immediately on bootup, which is great when loading linux because otherwise you would see a black LCD for a couple of seconds until the kernel framebuffer driver kicks in, and it is a bit confusing.
Implemented access to the SPL area (first eraseblock of NAND) in the linux kernel. This allows flashing the dual-boot binaries from linux.
Streamlined the flashing of the dual-boot binaries from linux.
This is what needs to be done:

Add a simple dialog that shows a disclaimer and asks for confirmation before flashing the dual-boot binaries.
That is very easy and I just need a couple of hours to do it, so I can assure there will be a release tomorrow or the day past tomorrow.

One final note: someone posted a comment pointing out that lingoox might sound a bit offensive in some contexts. If this is a problem we're on time to change it... so please let me know.