A bit too close to a troll, but there is a germ of a good point, which is whether its ethical for Nintendo to profit from this code. I think the answer is clearly yes, for the simple reason that the author chose to release his code for the world to use. Most projects will die in obscurity, unused (and unmourned).
There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That's a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world's best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don't know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a very high total comp.
(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my "wizard council". These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of "software" to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)
I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.
I'm reminded of a story Tim O'Reilley tells. When we started out, he published a set of the BSD documentation, which was explicitly licensed for free commercial use, this was long before what we know now as Creative Commons. He kept getting flak from people criticising him for profiting from publishing freely licensed documents, but one time he was at a book fair or conference and one of the authors told him how thrilled they all were to see their work in print and out there being used by so many people. That was a dream come true for them.
That is the ethos, it's what open source and CC is about. I may not be in a position to profit from some of my work, or I might be willing to donate it for free. If someone else can do something valuable enough to other people with it that they get paid to do it, good for them. The world is a better place. At the end of the day companies and corporations are just made up of people making a living.
Oh I don't know, I bet Google would love to hire someone like DHH just for their geek-brand. Honestly, they should have hired the homebrew guy for the same reason. But yeah, I think the FAANG+M's of the world understand the value of a "thought leader" type dev. (Microsoft has plenty of full-time open source devs on payroll, which I know because I've met some at conferences.)
There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That's a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world's best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don't know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a very high total comp.
(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my "wizard council". These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of "software" to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)