> How allowing commercial and in the case of BSD licencing, proprietary forks is > somehow supposed to gain the project anything is also beyond me.
the point is neither "allowing commercial" nor "allowing proprietary forks" and I really can't understand how people can think devs are going to sell MAME or restrict its usage or anything else Haze might have stated
the point is: - how many sellers have been stopped by the license restriction? zero (only some trademark infringements through ebay have been successful) - how many lines from other emus had required complete rewriting because of incompatible licenses? many (for instance whenever new findings were documented by authors of GPL'd & LGPL'd emulators and needed to be rewritten for MAME use because direct inclusion was not possible)
then we can discuss about which license to choose (I prefer BSD over GPL but to each is own), how to verify if the contributors agree with the change, and so on but suggesting that there are further motivations behind the proposal means that you've listened the wrong persons for too long