
MAME is now Free and Open Source Software - Lord_Nightmare
http://mamedev.org/?p=422
======
Gratsby
I'm blown away that it was not free and open source already. I remember
downloading it. I remember using it. I remember poking through the source at
one point. If it was proprietary software, it had the worst marketing program
ever. I had absolutely no idea there was any sort of paid alternative.

~~~
JoshTriplett
It was formerly under a miscellaneous collection of licenses that included
many "non-commercial use only" licenses (common in the emulator world at the
time, partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use, and
partly because some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade
cabinets).

~~~
computator
> partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use

I don't understand what you mean. Why is it bad to draw attention here?

> some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets

Why do you suppose that is? It's infuriating to see someone else make a lot of
money with something you developed for free?

Surely the world would have been a better place if they allowed all commercial
use. Someone would have put marketing money into MAME arcade cabinets, etc.,
and a lot more people would be using it and aware of it.

~~~
jarcane
Games companies have a long history of being viciously litigious to emulator
developers, one that still hasn't entirely faded (witness the number of ROM
and abandonware sites that still studiously avoid anything Nintendo or ESA).

Non-commercial use clauses were and are common with emulation software because
the perception is that this crosses a potential line into which such
litigation becomes clearly justified, and there's legal history to back it up.
Both Bleem and Connectix were essentially sued into oblivion for attempting to
sell commercial console emulators.

It's also something of an ethical line in the sand. Copying or cloning old
games that no one is making money on anymore for personal use is a gray area
as it is, but crossing the line into trying to charge money for it was seen as
exactly the sort of piracy people associate with shady companies in Hong Kong
and bootleggers selling bad CD-ROMs at county fairs.

So it became pretty much standard practice for a lot of emulators and
emulation sites to have explicit non-commercial use clauses in their TOS or
licenses.

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kstenerud
It was actually a pretty herculean effort to fix the licensing in MAME. It's
been at least a year since I got email asking for the licensing in my cores to
be switched over. They had to get an OK from everyone involved, or rewrite
portions of it.

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0xcde4c3db
This was way, way overdue. For much of its life, MAME was a total mess of
license restrictions. Just knowing that a file was in MAME didn't really yield
much reliable information about how it was licensed. Some parts of the code
were under seriously weird terms, including e.g. an assertion of the "right"
to change the license terms _retroactively_ (said license also refers to the
code as "copywritten"...).

Kudos to the team for sorting it out, and to all the old contributors who
agreed to relicense their code where necessary.

------
bsharitt
Nice. Maybe we'll see some legal "arcade collections" from publishers who can
now ship their own versions of MAME.

~~~
al_biglan
This. Tho I may complain about companies (Capcom, etc.) who would try to
extract "more money that they are worth" it would indeed be lovely to see them
offer a reasonably priced arcade bundle with some of their games.

Sadly tho, I don't think that this was a gating issue at all for the companies
:-(

Very nice job to the team at Mamedev tho! Congrats on what must have been a
long and tiresome journey to get to this point!

~~~
anon4
Capcom have already re-re-...-re-released Street Fighter II for every
platform, I don't think anyone will buy Street Fighter II Original Arcade
Edition.

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Deejahll
I'm curious why they changed from noncommercial permissive to GPL2+ instead of
GPL3.

If their goal is to prevent misuse of the project by unethical profit-minded
entities, GPL3's anti-tivoization language would have ensured that even if a
company profits from building or running a MAME-based cabinet (which is
good!), they wouldn't be able to deprive their customers' freedom to fix or
upgrade the software that runs it. (As they now can!)

It's even worse for the permissively-licensed parts of the code, which can now
be used to build locked-down proprietary cabinets that users can't even
inspect. I'm glad they got at least part of the project covered by copyleft.

The "common questions" on their site contains some confusing claims, too:

> Q. Can I include MAME with my product? > A. Yes. You can use 3-clause BSD
> compliant files but project as whole is under GPL-2.0 license so in case you
> wish to use those part you need approval from specific developers.

You'd only need permission if you didn't want to comply with the terms of
GPL2. There's nothing in GPL2 that requires permission for inclusion with a
product.

Maybe that's just leftover from before the license change?

~~~
Natanael_L
Because of the number of GPLv2 only projects they don't want to lose license
compatibility with

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Esau
I love Mame. I use it to play several games that aren't available otherwise.

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rahimnathwani
Off topic, but does anyone know why I get a '403 Forbidden' error when opening
this site from China?

~~~
tvvocold
Same to me，maybe you should turn on vpn or use some tools like
[http://git.io/d8s](http://git.io/d8s).

~~~
Tourniquet
China is mostly blocked from MAMEdev.org/MameTesters due to an annoying chap
or two that used to hassle developers. Since at least one of the core team is
based in China it's an annoyance.

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daveheq
If you're up to version 0.171 maybe it's OK to use something like 1.7.1

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HeavyStorm
Wait... It... Wasn't?

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roxsa26
Oh yeah

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blisterpeanuts
Now I can't get this out of my head, darn it!

    
    
      You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame,
      You charm the husk right off of the corn, Mame,
      You've got that banjoes strummin'
      And plunkin' out a tune to beat the band,
      The whole plantation's hummin'
      Since you brought Dixie back to Dixie land.
    

[https://youtu.be/mjZ7UwHaY8g](https://youtu.be/mjZ7UwHaY8g)

