> Put another way: barring some socialist revolution, who's going to [be able to] 'market' it?
OH... okay. You mean that people selling legal ROMs commercially and MAME's non-commercial use clause don't mix? Nope, not true. Example: StarROMS.com (of course, they're dead, and Atari may have been over-reaching with their claim to copyright...)
If you can get a license to resell ROMs... like Macrae theoretically could if there wasn't the license/copyright issue... then you can use them with MAME. (Although you shouldn't 'market' it that way or the MAME trademark will come into effect...) But you could say "for use with your original arcade board" or something. Or whatever. Admittedly, the potential audience is very small...
You just can't sell MAME, or its source code. And you can't provide MAME "for free" with your commercial product. Or reuse code w/o permission in commercial products. Or...
> I looked all these up, but a first reading didn't allow me to see how they might
> contradict.
In short, many licenses like the GPL _permit_ commercial sales/use provided that the source remains available.
MAMEDEV, in general, doesn't even want _that_.
[EDIT]
A further explanation, although not to start an argument over the meaning of "open source" and the validity and worthwhile-ness of licenses, and I'm summarizing quite a deal:
"Open source" according to organizations like the FSF basically means "free as in freedom", not "free as in beer". As you can see by (at this point) this one remaining clause in MAME's license makes it not "open" by their definition, since you're not free to do with the source code everything you want (sell binaries and/or source or use in a commercial product w/o permission)
Honestly, it took a while for me to understand all this. (I still bear the scars to prove it...) It's a tricky thing... In fact, I would not be surprised if I were still "wrong" in what I wrote above, by summarizing too much or something like that... Lawyers care about the details...
Most MAMEDEV who are license-knowledgeable prefer the term "source-available". It doesn't have those connotations...
-----------
Why do you keep asking about this? Are you planning on marketing arcade cabinets? Or are you just trying to "gotcha" the MAMEDEV's?
- Stiletto
Edited by Stiletto (11/11/10 05:40 AM)
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