mudlord: @Catshade: The warez scene shows attribution through NFO files. As explained earlier, it opens up a massive can of worms if GOG has those with along their installers.

lukaszthegreat: and what's NFO. i just assumed it is something bad.

Whitecroc: In my opinion, there is something wrong with this situation. There may not be a legal issue, but there does seem to be an ethical one. Two wrongs do not make a right, I say; "stealing" someone else's illegal work is spiteful and hypocritical.
Regardless of that, do we really want an "illegal" version of a game to be sold here? It undermines the moral integrity of the service, and should be below the dignity of the responsible team. Attribution does not enter into it; it should not be an issue to begin with.
Now, using a known crack as a guide for creating your own crack? That's fine with me. No point in wasting time searching for security loopholes or whatever it is you need when the information is readily available.
Either way, I still support GOG, but I hope these types of situations won't become the norm.

Whitecroc: I feel you did not read my post properly; my post was not about the legality, but the morals of the situation. If you find that the two are equal to each other, then I suppose I have little left to add.

Whitecroc: Now, using a known crack as a guide for creating your own crack? That's fine with me. No point in wasting time searching for security loopholes or whatever it is you need when the information is readily available.

soulgrindr: Jeez. this still going on? I totally don't see the issue. GOG sells games that are DRM free and easy to use, without spending hours tweaking them. They've used a number of existing solutions and known solutions to achieve that, as well as some of their own solutions.
If people have spent years figuring out the obscure solution to a bug in a game, should they really not make use of that knowledge as long as it's ok to do so?
I have a few of the games on here, and I could probably get them to work if I was willing to spend hours trawling forums, downloading patches, tweaking settings, getting other software and so on. But for me, and most people, it's a huge convenience to have them on GOG where they've done that work for us. They never claimed, and I never expected, that they were re-writing the source code or something like that.
How about this analogy:
The owner of a house finds out that the current tennant has made copies of his key and has been illegally subletting his rooms to lots of people.
The owner confiscates the keys and throws them out.
The owner then hires a rental agency to manage the property, and gives them the keys that he confiscated, so they can give them to the new tennants.
Legally wrong? nope. Morally wrong? nope. In any way wrong? Nope. Worth arguing about? Nope.
Crackers complaining about people not respecting their intellectual property, funny? yep.

AndrewC: You see, people that do programming usually recycle code, be it their own or the code other people wrote. We don't really like to reinvent the wheel every time ;)
Using a crack as a guide for creating your own crack would lead to the exact same crack; I don't really think you understand how these things work: you don't really have an "alternative way" of cracking a game as the method of the exploit is the same.
Sure, you could rewrite their hack and modify headers or rename functions (i/a) but that's just a waste of time on what, effectively, is the exact same code.

Whitecroc: Is this affiliation with pirates something we want, even if it's legal? My intuition says no, but my intuition also told me that it didn't matter if I switched doors or not. (Switching gives you a 2/3 chance of not getting a goat).