The legendary Homebrew Channel for the Nintendo Wii — a central piece of the console’s unofficial software ecosystem — has officially been archived on GitHub, following disturbing revelations about the origins of key components it relied on.
According to an official statement from the repository’s maintainers, the project will no longer accept further contributions. The team disclosed that significant portions of libogc, a library essential to Wii homebrew development, were discovered to have been stolen — not only from Nintendo’s proprietary SDK but also from an open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) known as RTEMS.
Originally, the Homebrew Channel developers had reluctantly used libogc, believing that at least some core parts, such as its threading implementation, were original work. However, recent investigations revealed that libogc’s threading and OS code were directly copied from RTEMS, with all copyright notices and attribution stripped — a move the maintainers describe as “outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.”
The situation worsened when the Homebrew Channel developers attempted to raise the issue with current libogc maintainers. Their concerns were met not with accountability, but with hostility: their GitHub issue was closed, insulted, and subsequently deleted from public view.
“The Wii homebrew community was all built on top of a pile of lies and copyright infringement, and it’s all thanks to shagkur (who did the stealing) and the rest of the team (who enabled it and did nothing when it was discovered),” the statement reads.
Because of these grave legal and ethical violations, the Homebrew Channel team has declared it impossible to legally or legitimately compile the software moving forward and has urged the community to demand ethical conduct from those who develop SDKs and toolkits for proprietary devices.
For those curious or skeptical, comparisons between specific functions in libogc and early versions of RTEMS code show overwhelming similarities, far beyond what could occur by coincidence.
The closure of the Homebrew Channel marks not just the end of a significant era in Wii homebrew, but also a sobering reminder of the importance of respecting open-source licensing — and the long-term consequences when that respect is absent.
