Games

Emulator devs deserve compensation, copyright laws are bullshit.

There's literally nothing that legally bars emulator devs from being paid, or even releasing their emulator as a commercial product outright. Except being sued and the cost of fighting that suit burying them financially.

Bleem! eventually won, and it was a commercial emulator for a then-current gen console. The cost of winning that fight put them out of business.

Not providing encryption keys/BIOS and not directly assisting with piracy are the key things to be legally in the right. Making money on it just makes you a more likely target, even if you're legally entirely in the right.

Could it be that they just copied the one in yuzus repo and hard-replaced the names?

Yes, it's pretty much the same text as before but contributor zqpvr also adjusted the spelling of "monetized" to "monetised", so it's definitively not like the document flew under the radar and it was just part of a bulk import with a search and replace of yuzu to suyu: https://gitlab.com/suyu-emu/suyu/-/wikis/Contributor-License-Agreement-Policy/diff?version_id=f4ca3a5422d153139ccc66fc4d86ccb844d937e7

So for now "2) more easily monetise the project [...] 3) restrict the access of non-core parts of the suyu source code" is the policy of suyu until revoked.

And that's what's gonna fuck them; making money off it. Unless they have enough money to actually go to court and fight Nintendo.

Exactly. And even if it did go to court, it wouldn't be hard to get EFF and the Linux Foundation to help Suyu.

Roe v Wade was overturned.

Legally speaking, nothing is impossible if one party is motivated enough, and other parties are too apathetic to do anything about it. And by other parties, I mean the public at large. The Linux and EFF communities are small by comparison.

The only way I know of to change a GPL license is to somehow contact everyone who has ever contributed to the project to agree to re-license their code, but there is no way I see Nintendo being able to pull that off... And, even if they did somehow manage to contact every one of these individuals, there's no way they'd get them to agree to that, no matter how much money they may have...

I mean, many thought the same of Yuzu.

Problem is, Yuzu team were breaking other laws. They were tweaking their codebase based on leaks.

I would not be shocked to see Nintendo either attempt to un-GPL the code, claim some sort of copyright over forks, or even to maliciously inject new code in an attempt to gain access to user IP addresses and just send out letters to every Yuzu user. Nintendo really is that petty, look at what they did to Gary Bowser. They will 100% go after other emulators like this now that they know the developers will just give up in a week.

Do you know how much of society depends on GPL code? Every Android phone, every Chromebook, most servers and many billion dollar companies rely on GPL code. Nintendo attempting to un-GPL Yuzu will wake some sleeping giants, who will realise other people might attempt to do the same to the projects they rely upon. As a result the defence fund for anyone Nintendo goes after like this will end up VERY well funded. As in, make-Disney-shit-their-pants well-funded.

As for your point on Gary Bowser, you're kinda leaving out that Nintendo had a MUCH stronger case against him. Unlike emulators, the development of piracy modchips is very much illegal.