> the point is: > - how many sellers have been stopped by the license restriction? zero (only some > trademark infringements through ebay have been successful)
Only because Mame haven't gone after them, it's still illegal and Mame (or some organization acting on the behalf of Mame developers) could go after them should they find the need. Meanwhile Mame itself is legally in the clear as it doesn't allow commercial use.
> - 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)
You tell me as you have the insight, how many? And more to the point, how is that really relevant nowadays when the necessary code has already been rewritten, if you have examples of GPL licenced code which Mame needs and can't use then state what that source code is, unless there's something concrete it sounds like nothing but hand waving, much like the 'museum' reason.
> 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
Actually although I first read about this from Haze's blog (from the link here on MW's homepage) but my opinions are based upon how this disruptive licence change makes no sense to me for the supposed reasons that have been stated. It would have made some sense years ago when Mame was less mature and perhaps lacked support for certain types of hardware emulation which were available under incompatible licences, but nowadays?
Again can you point me to something which Mame needs today and can't use now due to licence incompability?