Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Luke]

On 03/31/2016 08:59 PM, Matt Lee wrote:
> There are GPL licensed ROM images. Debian ships them for ZX Spectrum
> emulators, where the copyright holder (British Sky Broadcasting) makes
> other versions available only under effectively NC-ND terms. Instead Debian
> was able to convince the original development team of the benefits. I don't
> believe this is an isolated case either.
>
I agree with you on this. I began researching for GPL roms, and there
are quite a few popping up. Sometimes even when the original code was
proprietary, the developers later released the code as fully free software.

The same goes for PC and DOS games, such as Ryzom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code

As MAME emulates multiple systems, it is easy to find roms for many of
the consoles which can be used freely.
Be it homebrew or formerly proprietary games. Searching for "MAME" roms
is no good, because MAME itself is just a name, you have to pick an
individual console to find roms. (I didn't realize this until I began
researching it).

We should actually encourage our users to write to older game developers
and ask them if they will release the code under a GPL-compatible free
software license. As I see it, this can only help grow the free software
movement and the quality of packages we will be able to include in our
free distros.

If we are so concerned about controlling what our users do with free
software (which I feel is overreacting), then we could easily provide
them with a large collection of fully roms as an alternative.

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