Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Ivan Zaigralin]

The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I mean,
it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
perspective, which is a good thing.

On 03/29/2016 09:31 AM, alírio eyng wrote:
> these are the approaches i can think:
> *extremely conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
>  removing all emulators
> *conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
>  make packages/executables like game1-emulator1, game1-emulator2, ...
> and not allowing direct emulator installation/execution
> *liberal (avoiding false positive errors[1] and false negative errors[2])
>  allowing all emulators with free games know
> *extremely liberal (eliminating false negative errors)[2]
>  allowing all emulators
> 
> extremely liberal is naive because it just looks down in the
> dependency dag, there's no reason to not look up
> extremely conservative is naive because it doesn't allow completely free uses
> conservative would solve the issues that originate this thread
> liberal is more convenient in some cases
> 
> i consider conservative better, liberal ok, and any of the extremes 
> unreasonable
> 
> fsdg doesn't allow extremely liberal (according to other people
> interpretation), in ndiswrapper, for example:
> "with one exception, all ndis drivers are nonfree--and the one free
> one is a windows port of a native linux driver. so right now, this
> isn't useful for anything besides using nonfree software"[3]
> 
> parabola follows extremely conservative with your-freedom_emu[4]
> 
> assuming we choose conservative; for wine, we can make guile-wine,
> emacs-wine[5] and gnutls-wine[6], but remove wine
> 
> it seems there's at least one free game needing an emulator[7]
> 
> i think this is a discussion about fsdg[8] and we should discuss it at
> address@hidden
> 
> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_positive_error
> [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_negative_error
> [3]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines
> [4]https://www.parabola.nu/packages/libre/any/your-freedom_emu/
> [5]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01216.html
> [6]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-11/msg00333.html
> [7]http://pineight.com/lu/
> [8]http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
> 
>

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