Whole forum reads like a court full of Teal Bloods

Some people say Andrew Hussie was right in taking the UHC down but I fear that is dangerously stepping into Anne Rice levels of "The original Author can dictate whatever the fans do!" control. And this is a forum for fanworks so quite frankly I am a bit surprised to see some people parrot this idea lol

super real! while im inclined to believe gio more at the end of the day i dont really care for either of them here. at least theres always the cool fan content and fanventures

And I don't even know about the Sarah Z situation I really stopped being involved with Homestuck until only recently. I see a lot of people angrily yelling at one another because of something Hussie or Gio did, when in reality a lot of people just have no idea wtf is going on and have not been keeping up with this years long drama or fued or whatever lol.

hussie didnt even take down the unofficial collection, though? its still available elsewhere, iirc, and gio was the one who made the choice to take it down off his site.

The one thing I will post on these forums is yeah, I don't like the amount of people who are explicitly saying "the author can do whatever" bc i do think thats kinda fucked. we gotta protect fanworks. The UHC isn't fully down though, just Gio's page. that being said, this entire discussion has so much nuance and context from other situations it really is just best to sit back and see how things play out, and look for an official response eventually.

@akizetesche i don't understand why people keep saying this. i read the whole blog post and it says the UHC was taken down because gio received a cease & desist from andrew hussie

Yeah, I mean I wasn't going to buy merch from Hussie stuff anyways (especially not the makeship plushies because hoo boy makeship is a company that exists!) but people on both sides decide to say shit with no evidence and all we can really do is wait till HICU makes a response, hopefully one without bullshit.

Till then luckily everything homestuck is completely free to obtain and read (and theres for sure reuploads of the collection out there) including this site!

also mean to teal bloods >:(

"Hussie didn't take it down, he just threatened the person who made it with a bunch of legal bullshit until THEY took it down!" that is still Hussie "taking it down" btw lol, it would still be here if Hussie didn't do that. Gio did not take it down out of some change of heart on the matters of copyright infringement or whatever.

Anne Rice is rolling in her grave right now, she can sense people defending unethical fandom etiquette and the legal harassment of fan creators at this very moment.

Also from what I can understand certain forks of the UHC are still up, but the main one that was used by a lot of people was taken down. So yes, you can still access it I even downloaded it just in case but I have no idea if that means I have all of Homestuck "forever" or if it'll stop working for some weird reason if they get rid of those too (idk how this works so don't come to me as some expert take it up with the person who made it I guess lol). The reason I dislike stuff like this is because it is a slippery slope that lets Creators just do this to pretty much anyone. It's the whole "give 'em an inch, and they take a mile" anecdote.

Myeah, it annoys me as well, considering there's a bunch of questions surrounding things seen independently that could be clarified (I've posted about it here: https://www.fruityrumpus.com/forums/reply/68967355c24c58e653e549e3 ).

On the one hand, to me, Hussie seems, at best, Matt Mullenweg-levels of haunted-by-the-spectre-of-Lowtax levels of consummate poster. This is not how one should lead a project. Previous instances of lucid and honest statements have been very rare (the response after the Trickster Mode was a welcome change compared to earlier, at best, irony-laden not-entirely-serious Tumblr and Formspring posts, but then the 'fat vriska' jokes continued anyway), and an honest and clarifying answer here would be very welcome. This doesn't mean Hussie should be some kind of hero/example one should look up to (seriously, read the old Formspring posts), nor are they some kind of 'unique genious' (the influences Homestuck had are sometimes pretty blatant). But calling for Hussie's death (like in... that one thread) is extremely gross.

On the other hand, while Gio's posts try to sound objective, there are some stylistic things where petty grievances shine through. But given some material evidence (see the linked post), I am inclined to believe there is some truth to it. I wasn't present in the fandom from 2016 to 2022, so I really do not know how the "Hiveswap drama" played out in detail, so I also don't know how 'evil' Gio was in this period. I'm hearing things about him potentially harassing Kate (Mitchell I assume?), which would track with HS2, Pgenpod, and Snowbound Blood all halting at the same time, but I haven't seen any connection between that and Gio yet. (Kate did post https://shrike.club/@kate/114994954835369686 recently, which isn't super informative. The "I cannot comment publicly on the workplace conditions of Homestuck due to an NDA." sounds weird to me as a European, but it doesn't seem unthinkable to me that this might just be common US labour law bullshit , while such practices would absolutely be illegal over here.)

On the third hand (what kind of chump only has two?), someone posted this kind of questionable Reddit link to the forums: https://old.reddit.com/r/EnglishPumpkinParty/comments/1gh8mvk/breaking_news_hussie_is_still_in_control_of/ , the only saving grace for me about this is that Michael Guy Bowman seems to appear in there (I'll warn you, it's Reddit, don't read the comments). I don't know if he has published any sort of statement recently because I don't know anything about his socials etc.

In conclusion, I'm willing to believe at the same time that Homestuck Inc/Hussie/... are very bad at doing project management while being even more trigger-happy on legal threats than Nintendo to their own detriment, while Gio is also not a 'perfect little angel'.

(P.S. while "other forks of the UHC are still online", the asset pack takes some effort to locate, and most forks --- including the 'official' HICU one --- are behind on updates and bugfixes! Plus it's currently unclear how exactly development will continue. Will the HICU continue from their outdated 2.5.7 fork, or rebase to the latest version? Or try writing something else entirely? And at what pace, considering MSPA.org and homestuck.com have both been down for a prolonged amount of time.)

I keep forgetting there was a proper official website because the one I always used and recommended other people to use was https://homestuck.github.io, which is still up and has functional, working downloads. It's even the first result when you search "unofficial homestuck collection" (though this might have something to do with the sudden changes to the main website).

I'm personally taking a neutral stance on the whole issue until we get an official response from someone higher up on Hussie's side (assuming that happens), but I do think the people who are already writing UHC off as lost media are jumping the gun a bit.

(Also, I'm not talking about the exact legal details of the issue, on purpose. Who made the photo of St. Peter's Square (part of the Vatican) used in [S] Prince of Heart: Rise Up? Does anyone know???)

@rollypollypal: "the one I always used and recommended other people to use was https://homestuck.github.io, which is still up and has functional, working downloads"

That's the HICU's (outdated) fork I mentioned. Note how it only goes up to version 2.5.7, while Gio's version is currently at 2.7.1.

^ Yeah i have heard that this Gio person was the main one leading a transphobic hate brigade against a Homestuck writer. I was not apart of the fandom at that point but I vaguely heard some whispers of drama happening to a writer and there being bigotry involved. Because of this, I think it's totally fair that people are not really willing to believe the blog post or they just want more concrete evidence since neither party are exactly pure little angels who have done no wrong.

RE: "I have no idea if that means I have all of Homestuck "forever" or if it'll stop working for some weird reason"

i can confirm to you that even if every UHC fork gets taken down, it will still be safe on your computer. the whole thing is on your hard drive and doesn't require anything from the internet except for external links.

Oh okay thats a relief then because I really don't want to rely on the mirrors the UHC is so easy to navigate and find specific pages too T_T

Fuck it, I'll talk legal bullshit anyway:

The UHC application has no danger of disappearing at all --- it is licensed under the 'copyleft' GPLv3, which stipulates that even the original authors cannot stop others from using it, distributing it, or building onto it. These terms also mean that HICU (or anyone else) cannot suddenly lock the application from the public, as these requirements of free distribution and building-onto-it (the source code must also be given when asked) are true for whoever falls under the terms of the GPL. If someone does not abide by these rules of 'forced'-openness, organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy are willing to litigate such cases to make it public again.

The UHC asset pack is a different story. Of course it contains original artistic material by Hussie, Homestuck Inc, and contributors. But have all those contributors --- even the super early days ones --- signed a written contract that says the material can be distributed in other forms than just being posted on the official Homestuck website? What about clear 'influences' from 90s media strewn throughout Homestuck, from Con Air and Armageddon all the way to Mac And Me and Little Monsters? These could be seen as parody (exact boundaries of this differs between countries!) or 'fair use' (which is specific to the US and only granted on a case-by-case basis, there is no 'blanket fair use' thing in US law, and thus would need a court decision to be clear), or transformative (use in existing Google Image results for e.g. the Prospit and Derse landscape collages), but others are more worrying (Homestuck has both structural and visual 'inspiration' from The Neverending Story). And even Gio talks about the asset pack containing Adobe Flash binaries (property of Adobe, known to be 'annoying' about copyright). Hence, what happens to this is a bigger question. The HICU currently hosts it, but this is probably also only contingent on flying under larger companies' radar.

But there is a larger issue than just copyright (which I guess steals all the thunder, considering e.g. the semirecent Dolphin-vs-Steam kerfuffle, or anything involving Nintendo really), and that is software maintenance.

Operating systems change over time, and applications have to take these changes into account, otherwise their functioning will degrade over time, and will even stop working at one point. And this is besides fixing the currently-existing issues in the UHC application ( https://github.com/GiovanH/unofficial-homestuck-collection/issues , wew, 195 of them at the time of writing!). Currently, it is very unclear who will take up this task (the HICU, maybe????). It's possible that competing 'editions' will emerge. This is also what happened to e.g. Citra after the Yuzu organization got shut down: some people are trying to keep it in working condition, maybe fix a few issues, but they are much less familiar with the codebase, they don't have as much time, and so on. Youtube-dl had a good ending to this, as yt-dlp is currently the 'gold' standard. Let's hope this will also be the case for the UHC.