The latest update to the ongoing Gary Bowser situation is a rather major one. After being extradited and arrested, the Team Xecuter member was slapped with a $10 million dollar fine, and then taken to trial, where he was sentenced to over 3 years in prison. Bowser, also known online as GaryOPA, was set to serve his 40-month sentence in a US federal prison, but he and his lawyer argued for an early release. As of March 28th, Bowser has indeed been released from prison, though he is still at a detention facility, where he is awaiting transport back to Canada.

A video interview with Bowser offers some insight as to his experiences, including the fact that he has had no contact with any of the other TX members who have evaded capture. Despite having to pay a $10 million fine as a result of a civil suit, on top of another $4.5 million fine for circumventing devices illegally, Bowser has worked while in prison, earning enough to pay $175.00 of that 14,500,000.00 total. As a consequence, any job that Bowser gets after getting back to Canada will garnish his wages and send them to Nintendo, to the tune of about a third of his income, likely for the rest of his life.

Source

 

[stanleyopar2000]

Time to fake your death and go off the grid or get married and put it in your wife's name

 

[lukands]

Soon

SXOS update when?

 

[KennyAtom]

a little too heavy, but this dude fucked around and found out hard.
kinda deserved it too, from what I heard

 

[LightBeam]

The only person who ever had their Switch bricked was Hexkyz, who was reverse engineering it and then tweeted about how it could supposedly happen to anyone, despite it only ever happening to him and while he was reversing it no less. It's complete FUD but some people who are shall we say a little neuro diverse love to spread stuff they've heard from others to sound more knowledgeable on something they have almost no understanding of. They're the same people who say "well ackchually" to everything STEM related they see because they watched a Veritasium video one time.

Edit: Also ransomware demands that you pay them to get your data back, hence the name "ransom"ware. If you were hacking SXOS and it bricked your console you couldn't pay them to get your stuff back. That was it. It's done. Your data is overwritten and your eMMC is write locked with a randomly generated password. At most it's malware not ransomware. Gotta use big words to sound smart to the internet people though. How will they know I'm a really smart guy if I don't parrot other internet smart guys?

Interesting, I always thought the bricking thing was legit and that you could screw your console if you tried to « crack » SX without owning a proper licence for it

What about the claims of stolen open source homebrews tho ?


Definitely a big big fine, probably way too huge but that's Nintendo and that's not surprising at all.
But with all the confusion around SX, I just can't say I have much sympathy (for now)

 

[MasterJ360]

Interesting, I always thought the bricking thing was legit and that you could screw your console if you tried to « crack » SX without owning a proper licence for it

What about the claims of stolen open source homebrews tho ?


Definitely a big big fine, probably way too huge but that's Nintendo and that's not surprising at all.
But with all the confusion around SX, I just can't say I have much sympathy (for now)

The thing thats so off-putting is that majority of the users aren't even capable of tampering it to meet ends of a brick code.

 

[aos10]

If they take 35% of his salary, can he make them pay for the taxes for that 35%?
American tax system is stupid.

 

[sombrerosonic]

Twitter, lmao.

View attachment 365933

That img of mario is nintendo sueing me for downloading a virtual boy rom of jack bros (They're lossing money from sales of they're systems)

 

[snaker]

Guys for those who share hatred you must understand one thing. Gary has offered very much to the scene. Yes he eventually became greedy but i remember him back from xbox360 era. He was there to help at eurasia and maxconsole forums for those who remember. I didnt even know who he was at the time but i remember the name GaryOPA and there was so many times that i crossed his name searching for many useful stuff...

 

[linuxares]

If they take 35% of his salary, can he make them pay for the taxes for that 35%?
American tax system is stupid.

He is a Canadian Citizen, not US citizen.

 

[RexSonic]

he’ll probably flee to the dominican republic

 

[linuxares]

he’ll probably flee to the dominican republic

and get extradited again?

 

[RexSonic]

and get extradited again?

The Dominican Republic doesn’t extradite to USA as far as I know

 

[LightBeam]

The thing thats so off-putting is that majority of the users aren't even capable of tampering it to meet ends of a brick code.

Even if you tried to crack the licence ? I guess that's fine then

 

[CompSciOrBust]

What about the claims of stolen open source homebrews tho ?

SXOS itself is built on top of Atmosphere, which violates Atmosphere's licence since it's closed source and for profit. Knowing what I know about how TX operated I'm not convinced the heads knew about that though. They were very hands off with the developers and didn't ask too many questions as long as the end product did as was asked. In some cases they didn't even have the source code to the software they had paid to have made. They (the guys in charge) were actively trying to make friends with the open source people and I think they probably would have compensated Scires if they were able after finding out that the SXOS devs had taken his code, but there's no way in hell Scires would ever take money from TX anyway.

AFAIK SXOS was the only SX software with stolen code, since each tool was made by a different freelance dev and most of them just built stuff from scratch. TX actually funded some non SX homebrew too by providing developers with free hardware and paying for devs to have their consoles fixed if they accidentally broke them. Not that any of that justifies stealing Atmosphere's code but it's not as black and white as some people would have you believe. The stolen code in SXOS was a case of one bad developer doing something without the guys above being aware. For the most part TX wanted everyone to succeed because a thriving open source community drives more people to buy their products since you need TX hardware to run open source homebrew on post-2018 Switches anyway.

Edit: Also, anyone remember the 2018 Switch Homebrew Bounty? TX made a generous donation to that too to fuel the open source scene. Unfortunately I don't think GBATemp actually paid out to the devs after the third round of winners was announced haha. https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-homebrew-bounty-2018-switch-edition.518654/

The Dominican Republic doesn’t extradite to USA as far as I know

He was living in the Dominican Republic before specifically because of the extradition laws. Didn't seem to help because they extradited him anyway.

 

[pwsincd]

that interview was terrible.. wtf

Post automatically merged: Apr 20, 2023

SXOS itself is built on top of Atmosphere, which violates Atmosphere's licence since it's closed source and for profit. Knowing what I know about how TX operated I'm not convinced the heads knew about that though. They were very hands off with the developers and didn't ask too many questions as long as the end product did as was asked. In some cases they didn't even have the source code to the software they had paid to have made. They (the guys in charge) were actively trying to make friends with the open source people and I think they probably would have compensated Scires if they were able after finding out that the SXOS devs had taken his code, but there's no way in hell Scires would ever take money from TX anyway.

AFAIK SXOS was the only SX software with stolen code, since each tool was made by a different freelance dev and most of them just built stuff from scratch. TX actually funded some non SX homebrew too by providing developers with free hardware and paying for devs to have their consoles fixed if they accidentally broke them. Not that any of that justifies stealing Atmosphere's code but it's not as black and white as some people would have you believe. The stolen code in SXOS was a case of one bad developer doing something without the guys above being aware. For the most part TX wanted everyone to succeed because a thriving open source community drives more people to buy their products since you need TX hardware to run open source homebrew on post-2018 Switches anyway.

Edit: Also, anyone remember the 2018 Switch Homebrew Bounty? TX made a generous donation to that too to fuel the open source scene. Unfortunately I don't think GBATemp actually paid out to the devs after the third round of winners was announced haha. https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-homebrew-bounty-2018-switch-edition.518654/


He was living in the Dominican Republic before specifically because of the extradition laws. Didn't seem to help because they extradited him anyway.

you think they where concerned over atmosphere devs thoughts considering the attitude they had towards Nintendo ? i think they where happy to exploit anything possible for their gains

 

[MasterJ360]

Even if you tried to crack the licence ? I guess that's fine then

Someone already did that here made a public license, but you still cant achieve XCI HDD mounting so its pretty much useless to use.

 

[linuxares]

The Dominican Republic doesn’t extradite to USA as far as I know

And then you're wrong since it was from there he got extradited in the first place

 

[linuxares]

https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/114th-congress/10/document-text for those who's missed that DR and US updated their laws for this

 

[realtimesave]

a little too heavy, but this dude fucked around and found out hard.
kinda deserved it too, from what I heard

well selling pirated software was a bright idea... just saying.

 

[White_Raven_X]

He still wasn't the "mastermind" just the mule.
I hoenstly hope he had money somewhere and just keeps living of that. It's not worth his time behind bars just because some people want to pirate video games.

I agree with you.

I always thought it was shitty and ass backwards to have charged money for the OS and resented SX OS because of that, but nobody deserves this fine. Fuck Nintendo. At MOST make it 5 years! 30% of his income for the rest of his life is absolutely insane.

I'd say I hope he's able to get a gofundme or something to help offset the costs, but that would indirectly benefit Nintendo, which I don't want. Seriously glad I stopped supporting them with the Switch. Everything I got was used including the system, minus a single $25 game that cost less new than it did used (the used market is atrocious).

It is pretty stupid how they decided to charge customers for access to their software/hardware but it appears people are charging "donations" to access servers to download games directly to the switch. I never supported them and never would. That kind of stuff should be open source and free of charge.