What's goin on in MAME?

[Ed Oscuro]

It will provide the owners of games an easy way to package them for consumers.

This is something that wasn't part of the MAME project's goals from the beginning. Some developers might not take kindly to the idea that their work is being used commercially by anyone - and right now the license supports them. The game developers aren't unpaid volunteers for Squeenix or for some ROM reseller.

MAME is intended, as it says on the tin, to document the games - and that is enough. It's not MAMEdev's problem if Dot Emu doesn't know how to program, and it's not their problem if big companies are too sightless and lazy to preserve their back catalogs instead of buying more deck chairs for investors' yachts. Nintendo has, despite all the bad I think it's done, been very good about having pride in its history and preserving it - in that way it's a model for an industry that does all it can to subvert and forget the care and artistry it makes use of in turning a profit.

Right now its use is 99.9999% theft.

One could bow to copyright holders entirely and outlaw VCRs and DVRs, too, but we don't. It's not a far jump from this "MAME is theft" argument to say that even resale of old arcade PCBs is bad because it's not giving a nickel to the game copyright owners. It's not a jump at all to point out that almost no game copyright owners don't give residuals or other benefits to old developers. Depending on your perspective, one can always cry "theft" at some point in the process.

So MAME's end users have no clear right to use ROMs which they aren't entitled to, but likewise people outside the project have no right to "steal" (I think using those terms is far less than ideal) the work of the developers.

Oh, and the whole museum/educational roadblock is seriously hurting the history goal.

Random people have said it is a problem, which is a far way from it actually being shown to be a problem.

I think what this boils down to is hindsight: One can plausibly say that the license doesn't accomplish this or that good thing. But to fix that you'd have to go back in time and convince the project owners to go with a different license. Respecting the license and holding the community together is more important than chasing some tangential possible good for copyright owners (who would love to have unpaid volunteers not only preserving the games, but building them as well).

One of the key differences between MAME and Linux is that everybody saw the value of Linux from the start. Game developers didn't step up to offer support to MAME, and still haven't, so why should they be given special consideration over MAME developers' rights and the continuation of the project as a free enterprise? I don't give Fox veto rights on what goes into my VCR.

[PurpBullets]

I feel like I should add that MAME is already a museum unto its self really.
Just because the smithsonian wont display MAME does not hinder the goal of MAME at all.

[dcharlie]

I'd prefer museums to have collections of PCBs rather than emulators !

[antron]

This is something that wasn't part of the MAME project's goals from the beginning. Some developers might not take kindly to the idea that their work is being used commercially by anyone - and right now the license supports them. The game developers aren't unpaid volunteers for Squeenix or for some ROM reseller.

Until they lawyer up, the reality is, they will remain unpaid volunteers for someone. Right now that's the ROM seller.

It's quite possible that on whole the developers simply do not care if it's hucksters vs corporate owners distributing MAME binaries. I think they could benefit if they allowed the later. They surely cannot complain for the lack of business support with a license that is so anti-business. But perhaps they simply do not want any outside influence.

[Ed Oscuro]

There's some things you can't avoid, but the ingenious solution is apparently "let's force it so that they don't even have a potential objection to uses of the trademark and their code." That certainly doesn't address your problem with the romz.

[antron]

I never said anything about the trademark. For the code, I think the successes of truly open licences speak for themselves, and they do exactly what you ridicule.

[Ed Oscuro]

Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it's unimportant.

I also think it's pretty clear you didn't track the conversation. I not only pointed out that other open-source licensed "do what you ridicule" (not sure what you mean here), but I also pointed out that MAME isn't like other open-source projects because it inherently can conflict with the wishes of copyright owners (which is not the same thing as being a "bad" program).

Letting copyright holders get a free ride off MAME developer efforts isn't going to magically balance the karma in the universe to blot out the supposed evils of people using MAME. But it does seem like giving people who didn't contribute to the project have a say, over the objections of people who actually have contributed effort. MAME isn't about righting all the wrongs in the world; it's about keeping the process going.

[antron]

I'm following you ok, I just don't agree. Even if some game IP holders dislike MAME not forbidding commercial use then who cares? Open source contributors are not responsible for the use of the code, that's one of the primary features of GPL as I'm sure you know.

[system11]

The people making money off MAME don't give a flying fuck about the license, so they may aswell use a standard one so that law abiding companies can use it too...

[e_tank]

The people making money off MAME don't give a flying fuck about the license, so they may aswell use a standard one so that law abiding companies can use it too...

exactly. most people selling mame (not including app store land) are also selling roms along with it thus the absolute last people they're afraid of is mamedev, who have little to no resources to enforce and/or punish those who violate its license. mame (and snes9x too) would've been better off by from the start picking an established license that fits their core vision, like the gpl, because at this point in the game it's really too late for them to change.

afaict the only practical good the current license does is makes it easy to stop people from selling mame on app stores, as all they have to do is file a take down claim any time they see one pop up for sale. however, if mame were gpl this problem would pretty much take care of itself, as if anyone selling mame didn't release the source modifications they could still file a take down claim, and if the changes were available anyone else could step in and offer the same exact thing for free, there by cutting off ~99.9% of any income these people would be able to get.

[cools]

MAMEdev has not once gone after anyone about the non-commercial clause. I don't care about the enforcement, I care about the statement that it's not sanctioned for commercial use, and if you use it as such, you're a bad person and should stop.

Removing that clause essentially means saying "Hey, go ahead and gut peoples' pockets with us, we don't care!" which is frankly bullshit and awful.

If the license does change, who is going to go after who?

The project will lose face for a bit and some developers, but it's not going to die. Allowing commercial use might actually encourage investment from copyright holders and others seeking to further it along.

[system11]

Removing that clause essentially means saying "Hey, go ahead and gut peoples' pockets with us, we don't care!" which is frankly bullshit and awful.

You say that like it's not completely routine now. Just GPL it, then at least people who do modify it are compelled to give back, although of course they'll probably just ignore the license like they do now. There's a time and place for bullshit idealism, at others it's just a waste of everyone's time.

As for the other post, pulling code submissions would be pointless and counterproductive. 1) someone could just resubmit your code, and you could complain and that's it - it's not copyright. The whole concept of copyright surrounding the massive grey area known as MAME is a non starter. 2) you'd be hurting many just to protest against a few.

[Ed Oscuro]

I see the point with the "GPL" and "selling isn't counterproductive" points. But unfortunately there are two things that probably have to be ignored to make it work:

- Good project governance isn't optional, and even if some contributors' concerns aren't the right ones, there needs to be a process in place so they can be heard before they decide to contribute. Changing things after people have contributed is how contributors get shafted, as in the sale of Mobygames to GameFly.

- It's just too late to make this change, whatever the arguments, while keeping contributor code.

I think that knowing that project leads aren't going to do illegal things when they feel like it is more important than all the other things that were mentioned from the beginning, including the most recent points.

Also, you're quite mistaken about copyright and code, system11 - MAME's legal page already acknowledges that there is a copyright component to the code. It doesn't recognize that the contributors hold copyright - I believe they assign the copyright to the project but the project basically accepts some restrictions as a condition for that assignment. In other words, whether the contributors hold copyright is down to the terms of the licensing agreement. Code is certainly copyrightable. But again, as stated above, this is a non-starter - the license itself limits the MAME project and its administration.

Perhaps what could be done is that all the "documentation" of MAME could be used to re-write all the code into a parallel structure that is basically MAME written from scratch with the current stuff as reference. That would be one hell of an undertaking. This is likely the only feasible option in order to usher in the new golden age of the GPL.