I suspect that it was neither for clout nor circumvention, but ignorance and people doubling down on that ignorance. If you are not specifically bathed in the norms of the FOSS community, GPL is kind of an unintuitive concept. It's a copyright license that forces you to disclaim most of the benefits of copyright protection. If you're coming from a piracy or game modding scene, where copyright is a thing you wipe your ass with, even the bare minimum of GPL compliance is going to seem like a waste of time at best and someone else trying to butt in on your project at worst.
Think about how many pirates do piracy because they think copyright is unethical, versus how many of them are data hoarders, or just want shit for free, or are reselling shady IPTV boxes on eBay. The former two groups are FOSS-adjacent, but the latter two do not care. Then keep in mind how basically any free shit tends to be almost immediately abused by children with an Internet connection and no access to payment rails.
Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a court.
That's what makes it come off as stupid and kneejerk to me. This guy wrote "The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement" like it's some kind of shocking revelation. The guy writes it in a way that makes me think it's fueled by some years-long grudge rather than an intent to unravel some kind of conspiracy. It's kinda pathetic, really.
> Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a court.
I realize the homebrew scene doesn't view themselves this way, but I pretty much view them as part of the piracy scene even when they are antagonistic towards those who pirate games. The main difference is that they are "pirating" hardware rather than software. By that I mean they are overriding DRM created by the hardware vendor to use the hardware in unauthorized ways.
Now it is easy to say that you should be able to do what you want with hardware you own. In most respects, I am sympathetic with that. Yet I don't like that philosophy for one big reason: it creates a huge disincentive to those who want to create open platforms since it is going to be nearly impossible for them to get any traction when they are up against jailbroken devices from huge multinational corporations.
> it creates a huge disincentive to those who want to create open platforms since it is going to be nearly impossible for them to get any traction when they are up against jailbroken devices from huge multinational corporations.
I'm not so sure about that. More specifically, I wonder if there are more or fewer Steam Decks in the wild than jailbroken Nintendo Switch units.
When I was writing that, I was thinking of other platforms. For example: I had a GP2X at one point, which was a handheld console that ran Linux. It clearly wasn't a mass-market device, but it was an open platform with plenty of development tools. It should have been the sort of thing that appealed to homebrew developers. It was appealing for some, but it was up against the Nintendo DS with flash cartridges. There were almost certainly more flash cartridges than GP2X's in the world, even though they were a grey market item (at best). They didn't have a chance, and I think they only managed to produce one successor before going out of business. (Of course, there were other factors. This was right around the time of smartphones becoming popular. Smartphones may have crumby controls for gaming, but at least anyone could develop software for Android and the barrier to entry was relatively low for iOS.)
The Steam Deck, well, that has other things going for it. Yes, it is an open platform. Yet it, along with similar devices, are also PC compatible. That makes it appealing to developers, may they be developing games for Linux or Windows. Perhaps the biggest thing going for it is being backed by Valve, which is large enough to coexist with Nintendo and is unusual for a larger company in that they value an open ecosystem. To understand how unusual that is for a large player entering the market, just look at the original Xbox.
I very much doubt that jailbreaking and the homebrew scene contribute significantly to the difficulty of building a financially viable open hardware platform.
Building a mass market hardware platform of any kind is incredibly difficult on its own merits.
Think about how many pirates do piracy because they think copyright is unethical, versus how many of them are data hoarders, or just want shit for free, or are reselling shady IPTV boxes on eBay. The former two groups are FOSS-adjacent, but the latter two do not care. Then keep in mind how basically any free shit tends to be almost immediately abused by children with an Internet connection and no access to payment rails.
Homebrew scenes seem like a candidate for doing things "the right way", but culturally they're a lot closer to piracy scenes than anyone wants to admit, at least in front of a court.