I don't want to believe this shit. http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2013/10/15/the-end/ The original post was edited, and now reads:
Not the end by any means but if the new license is to be used the MAME devteam will be severely weakened for sure because of that article even though it's a fair point to consider the restrictions that disallow preservation institutions to use it if you stop to think about it.
Lots of open source projects are going commercial, a few years ago it was crazy to even think ubuntu was going to come with a bunch of datamining crap from amazon and now it does Making Mame commercial would be even less difficult than making bittorrent commecial, and lo and behold they did with investors and everything.
They need a legal institution to go in and really hammer down the legalese that is required. Their stated goal is preservation, so they need to define what commercial is, what is acceptable use, and all of that now. Its one of many issues regarding preservation that Ive started to look at.
What exactly does "commercial" mean in this context? I know Ubuntu uses some commercially licensed components, but it's still free. So would MAME still be free to use? The whole thing does sound pretty lame. Do they plan on compensating the companies whose arcade systems they're emulating?
Mame development hasn't been that active anyway in recent years. Mostly majong japanese games and some minor tweaks to current emulation. Gauntlet Legends remains slow and later machines have their own dedicated emulators like Supermodel.
The EFF will just tell them what everyone else tried to tell them years ago: Switch to a GPL licence.
It means there would be a MAME company that holds the rights on the emulator and all related tech. In the case of ubuntu thats only for tech they developed like unity, same with google and certain components of android About compensating, no way, at best they waive the license for emulator+game packs, and even that might seem too generous And that sucks, supermodel has been stuck in alpha for a while, it reminds me of modeler which never made it to beta
i was with them for 3 weeks, they are a band of tards. So many different interests and so many egos over there. They ar condemned to die and i cant say that they dont deserve it, i know others that got pissed and stopped contributing aswell. Also one thing : emulation is not as popular as 10 years ago, maybe they plan to get money doing console emulators. I have some friends that are working on that and it seems a good bussiness.
10 years? try 15, the late 90's with bleem! and N64 emulators, those were the days! why buy a console if you could get an emulator that ran the game even better? The PS2 changed everything, it was way too complex and by the time there was an emulator the current gen was well underway. There is not comparison to the heyday when you were able to emulate a game that just came out on PSX using a midend PC with the added benefit of higher def and AA Is the same with MAME: the early arcades of the 80's were easy, it took forever to get the Model2 games to work, arcades were dead by that time.
he's made a couple updates since this quoted post, definitely sounds like a bum move for the dev side of things
I have been following the story and the plan as of right now is that certain source files are going to be dual-licensed MAME-BSD or MAME-LGPL or MAME-GPL but its only being done if all the people who contributed to the source file are happy to allow such a change. The reason for the re-license discussion is NOT to make MAME commercial (there are no plans to start charging money for MAME or MESS) but because a re-license will let them use components from other emulators and software which are licensed under BSD/LGPL/GPL. And also to allow other emulators to use bits of MAME.
I get the impression that while the decision 'to' relicense is being made in the interest of longterm preservation / usability of the code, that the developers worry that once it gets fully relicensed they could wind up in a position where it does become commercial and they have no say in it
You can keep up with this at mameworld though aarongiles says thier is nothing to worry about. http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Number=316273
I don't remember what it was, more than 5 years passed (maybe more), but it's not the first time Haze started the drama.
