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Private What's changed in the last 5 years?

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Following this logic, as a retro developer; how is it ok to reverse-engineer Habbo, which is someone else's property?
Amen to that.

Any emulator is one big illegal project - your license literally means nothing. You have no leg to stand on when someone violates your license. This is like a thief telling another thief it is illegal to steal their stolen goods. Unfortunately this has been a discussion in this section for the last (couple of?) year(s?).
 
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Following this logic, as a retro developer; how is it ok to reverse-engineer Habbo, which is someone else's property?

Its not. Its illegal to run retros. Reverse engineering is allowed. Building an emulator is allowed. Running an emulator to do copyright infringement, selling licenses, any monetary incentive is not. But you dont call people out on their retros so whatever.
Its not allowed to decompile & rename copyrighted content either.

But as a community for habbo emulation you'd atleast expect people to have respect for others work, which is already too much asked here, unfortunately. Its a toxic place and it could've been different but alas people rather have renames than a stable emulator and not call people out on their shenanigans.
 
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Its not. Its illegal to run retros. Reverse engineering is allowed. Building an emulator is allowed. Running an emulator to do copyright infringement, selling licenses, any monetary incentive is not. But you dont call people out on their retros so whatever.
Its not allowed to decompile & rename copyrighted content either.

But as a community for habbo emulation you'd atleast expect people to have respect for others work, which is already too much asked here, unfortunately. Its a toxic place and it could've been different but alas people rather have renames than a stable emulator and not call people out on their shenanigans.

I didn't ask if it was legal or illegal. I asked if it was ok in terms of respecting other people's property as you so clearly point out nobody is capable of in this section:

Following this logic, as a retro developer; how is it ok to reverse-engineer Habbo, which is someone else's property?
 
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Its not. Its illegal to run retros. Reverse engineering is allowed. Building an emulator is allowed.

I didn't ask if it was legal or illegal. I asked if it was ok in terms of respecting other people's property as you so clearly point out nobody is capable of in this section:

I did. Let me show you why I believe it is illegal to reverse engineer copyrighted work.
Reverse engineering copyright work seems illegal according to the EU and US law. According to the law it is not legal to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted work (which is the purpose of reverse engineering Habbo Hotel, isn't it?) just like using this copyrighted work (running a retro). ,

The software license of Habbo also makes this illegal:

The copying, reproduction, modification, and creation of derivative works of the Software to any other server or location for further reproduction, redistribution, selling, loaning, leasing, renting is expressly prohibited except as permitted under the terms of the relative Licence Agreement.

I'm not here to join a discussion or cause one, but I am tired of the whole "my license violation" discussion in this section which is a waste of everyone's time. Yes, technically people are violating your license, but technically you can't do anything about it since you're on the same level of illegality as they are (maybe even worse, since you provided them the knowledge and the base of the work of the people who 'renamed' your emulator)
 
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technically you can't do anything about it since you're on the same level of illegality as they are (maybe even worse, since you provided them the knowledge and the base of the work of the people who 'renamed' your emulator)

This is the legal part of the point I was trying to make, I was thinking more about how people respect each others work in terms of behavior. My point is that when you are copying/emulating/whatever for personal gain, you cannot expect others that are also copying/emulating/whatever the same stuff to respect your property. If they don't respect the property of the original owner, why would they respect yours? As long as they don't gain anything from it, they won't. Htards are only interested in getting their ego boosted by slapping their name on your emulator, or get the latest features to their servers to get more users. They will care as much about your property as Sulake's.
 
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The problem here is that people are still being dicks and its tolerated to steal, leech, rename. People have stopped contributing because of the intolerance of the RZ staff to support development. There used to be rules in place that prohibited decompiled, closed source work of fellow members to be posted here as it would discourage future contributions, and it definitely has discouraged plenty of contributions that never happened. Someone in their insane mind figured it was better to allow renames rather than having a few quality contributions. Meh, history is repeating itself just like it did with butterstorm / plus. Crappy renames just because people want some attention and have their name in the server console, regardless of a new version of habbo.

Also why you think the only active developments don't have their source code posted...?
 
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Trouble? Locked up? Dunno what you guys think happened to me but at no point was I locked up or arrested lol.
I miss Otaku too and I miss working on Phoenix. I was reading through some of my old threads on here yesterday getting all nostalgic.

I have no regrets though, apart from being too public about who I actually was haha. I'm a full time web developer for a big company now and I have Habbo and those first v1 releases to thank for that. Life is good man and Otaku and Phoenix were an amazing experience to learn from and I made some amazing friends in real life from it too.

I did some poop bag things in the past but so did most people here, we were young and dumb. If you still have ill feelings toward me that's sad but I won't lose sleep over it. I contributed a whole section of my youth to this and even though some people like to blame me for making development stale I'd argue that's not really my fault, those that wanted to develop could have developed, if anything, I brought retros to the mainstream.

That wasn't me being serious, it's a story you could tell your kids/grandkids - a big evil corporation tried to get me down but I persevered and beat the system (that's what I would do anyway)
 
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The problem here is that people are still being dicks and its tolerated to steal, leech, rename. People have stopped contributing because of the intolerance of the RZ staff to support development. There used to be rules in place that prohibited decompiled, closed source work of fellow members to be posted here as it would discourage future contributions, and it definitely has discouraged plenty of contributions that never happened. Someone in their insane mind figured it was better to allow renames rather than having a few quality contributions. Meh, history is repeating itself just like it did with butterstorm / plus. Crappy renames just because people want some attention and have their name in the server console, regardless of a new version of habbo.

Also why you think the only active developments don't have their source code posted...?

The lack of development on RaGEZONE doesn't necessarily have to do with the fact that we do not protect developers from others who are creating their own emulator based on the version of another development project. Obviously there are developers who are no longer developing because they are not being protected, but the state of the forum isn't what it used to be like back in the days. Times are changing, so is the concept of forums and private servers. People are playing less private servers than they used to do 10 years ago. Forums have migrated to platforms like Discord. Let's be realistic; RaGEZONE isn't quite known for adapting to the new future.

People are also changing. Most of us are adults with fulltime jobs and were teenagers when they registered on RaGEZONE. Private servers were popular in our youth and most people had the time to develop them. Nowadays only a handful of people are developing on RaGEZONE because it's their hobby or for educational purposes.

I'm not going to tell you ( @The General ) what to do, I respect every decision you make with your emulator or projects. But from my perspective people have been asking for an open source version for years. Your emulator is known as one (if not) the best retro emulator on RaGEZONE. It is not your responsibility, let me make that clear, but you could've released an open source version of your emulator to improve the development of retros. Look at the amount of people that are working at a re-make of your emulator and what they are able to accomplish. You could've accomplished even greater things if you worked together with all the talented developers on RaGEZONE. It also could've boosted the development of Habbo Hotel greatly.

I'm trying to make a point here; the state of the forum is not only to blame on the staff of the forum. And I'm not saying it's only to blame on the community neither, but there were certain people in the right position to boost the development. I'm not pointing at you only, there are many more closed source emulators on RaGEZONE.
 
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The problem here is that people are still being dicks and its tolerated to steal, leech, rename. People have stopped contributing because of the intolerance of the RZ staff to support development. There used to be rules in place that prohibited decompiled, closed source work of fellow members to be posted here as it would discourage future contributions, and it definitely has discouraged plenty of contributions that never happened. Someone in their insane mind figured it was better to allow renames rather than having a few quality contributions. Meh, history is repeating itself just like it did with butterstorm / plus. Crappy renames just because people want some attention and have their name in the server console, regardless of a new version of habbo.

Also why you think the only active developments don't have their source code posted...?

The real issue and you keep avoiding it and I will keep reiterating it: You cannot simply relicense your emulator no matter how much you want to ignore the elephant in the room, you accepted contributions under the terms of the GPL license, you must ask every single contributor for permission to relicense your project. Literally anybody who knows anything about software licenses knows this. It happens all the time, a project wants to relicense so they remove prior contributions from people who don't want to comply with the new suggested license. The only way you could change the license is if you had made the project MIT licensed.

You can't claim to want people to follow a software license when you yourself are attempting to violate the GPL.
 
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I'm not going to tell you ( @The General ) what to do, I respect every decision you make with your emulator or projects. But from my perspective people have been asking for an open source version for years. Your emulator is known as one (if not) the best retro emulator on RaGEZONE. It is not your responsibility, let me make that clear, but you could've released an open source version of your emulator to improve the development of retros. Look at the amount of people that are working at a re-make of your emulator and what they are able to accomplish. You could've accomplished even greater things if you worked together with all the talented developers on RaGEZONE. It also could've boosted the development of Habbo Hotel greatly.

I'm trying to make a point here; the state of the forum is not only to blame on the staff of the forum. And I'm not saying it's only to blame on the community neither, but there were certain people in the right position to boost the development. I'm not pointing at you only, there are many more closed source emulators on RaGEZONE.

Arcturus was open source for 3 years. After a year of literally no contributions I continued closed source. There was a plugin API to extend functionality which was well documented.

But in the end it doesnt matter, people cannot show any respect for other peoples work and their own monetary gain, attention is more important than the original authors wishes.

There have been numerous times where people have explicitly told me, Ive seen what happened to Butterfly / Arcturus and thats why I dont want to release my work. Thats a clear sign that people are generally dicks and on top of that its tolerated.

People from morningcrap have hacked my personal accounts, doxxed me (I got linkedin invites, and list of people who viewed my profile, which includes ex RZ staff), hacked my RZ account, emails. Not to mention they bought my old domain that lapsed and now redirect it to their own crappy website which states that I had the intention to monitize the project which for some reason they think gave them the right to do what they do and also imply that I am okay with what they are doing. Not only that they are twisting my words as I have said, dont like it use something else. That else meaning an other emulator, not stealing and renaming that emulator you are constantly shitting on. They are too lazy and to cheap to put in their own actual effort and as long as this toxic behavior is tolerated here, this section is doomed. RZ couldve been a great example on how to set the opinions in an community in order to encourage developers to share their work. The amount of influence RZ has had in the past is its own downfall as toxic attitude is accepted, unfortunately.



The real issue and you keep avoiding it and I will keep reiterating it: You cannot simply relicense your emulator no matter how much you want to ignore the elephant in the room, you accepted contributions under the terms of the GPL license, you must ask every single contributor for permission to relicense your project. Literally anybody who knows anything about software licenses knows this. It happens all the time, a project wants to relicense so they remove prior contributions from people who don't want to comply with the new suggested license. The only way you could change the license is if you had made the project MIT licensed.

You can't claim to want people to follow a software license when you yourself are attempting to violate the GPL.

You are 100% incorrect and are missing the point. This problem is not about what is legal and what is not. Its the problem of getting your e-peen out of eachothers arses and mature the duck up and respect the wishes and effort of the original authors. But no, having your name on a stolen emulator is apparently going to get you kudos nowadays, supposedly. What they do, have done, and most likely will keep doing is wrong and its a shame that this kind behavior is accepted, tolerated and even encouraged.


As I am the author I have the copyright to the code I wrote. Any contributions to the code belong to those who have made them. As 1.9.0 is still open source anyone can use that to build their emulator upon. It is perfectly legal to continue a closed source version even if you are not 100% the author. See google authenticator, was open source but continued closed source. What is illegal is decompiling closded source software, redistributing, rehosting its sources.

I have had asked the majority of contributors if they were okay with changing it closed source and from those who I got a response they were totally fine with it as long as the old version was still open source, and to this day it still is. And not to mention, the old license did say: Do not rename, do not claim as yours, do not rehost the sources outside of bitbucket without my explicit permission. Hurr durr license.
 
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Congrats everyone on creating another "community vs TheGeneral" discussion.
Yes and no. You're missing the point. It was predictable the direction of this thread would head this way and I have been moderating this thread heavily to avoid that. I've been removing posts and infracting people in this thread. It is unfortunate certain people draw the attention to themselves all the time or others feel like attacking someone else all the time which makes any discussion worthy topic useless. This time we decided to allow this to go on until the discussion has reached a certain limit, which vLife stated in the previous page. That is because this thread gives anyone a perfect idea of what has happened in the last 5 years of this section.
 
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Honestly in these past 5 years though it may seem that development has died out, there are actually a lot of cool projects being developed behind the scene, I'm mostly focused on projects using Arcturus Morningstar, but here are the good things that iv noticed in that community, here are some.

1. Bills Nitro-HTML-5 Project.
Its honestly the only one iv seen that has an active development and that works nativley-ish with an emulator, as bill mostly had to use habbos original swf to figure out how things work.

2. Raizers Cosmic CMS
say anything u want about raizer and his cms, but by far the most secure and well maintained CMS (Arcturus Morningstar compatible) , hes also working on his new cms Meteor which is better than Cosmic

3. many of the krews apps and plugins built by former developers of Arcturus, its honestly nice seeing a community that gives and develops together, there are easy to setup apps like Youtube TV , an updater for clothing, the habbo camera and more. and all the community side projects.

4. even though development on ragezone is honestly kinda dead, many discords are highly active in the habbo scene.

5. we also seem to have insiders on the habbo2020 beta leaking information to the public but still being private for now so they can milk as much info before the beta ends.

thanks for reading this, sorry if it seems like im siding with Morningstar, but its my emulator of choice as its honestly the one i prefer.
 
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Honestly in these past 5 years though it may seem that development has died out, there are actually a lot of cool projects being developed behind the scene, I'm mostly focused on projects using Arcturus Morningstar, but here are the good things that iv noticed in that community, here are some.

1. Bills Nitro-HTML-5 Project.
Its honestly the only one iv seen that has an active development and that works nativley-ish with an emulator, as bill mostly had to use habbos original swf to figure out how things work.

2. Raizers Cosmic CMS
say anything u want about raizer and his cms, but by far the most secure and well maintained CMS (Arcturus Morningstar compatible) , hes also working on his new cms Meteor which is better than Cosmic

3. many of the krews apps and plugins built by former developers of Arcturus, its honestly nice seeing a community that gives and develops together, there are easy to setup apps like Youtube TV , an updater for clothing, the habbo camera and more. and all the community side projects.

4. even though development on ragezone is honestly kinda dead, many discords are highly active in the habbo scene.

5. we also seem to have insiders on the habbo2020 beta leaking information to the public but still being private for now so they can milk as much info before the beta ends.

thanks for reading this, sorry if it seems like im siding with Morningstar, but its my emulator of choice as its honestly the one i prefer.

I think the HTML5 client project is definitely a game changer. There's no telling yet what Habbo 2020 will bring.
 
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