> > One concrete example: back when our ST-V/Saturn support was useless I politely > asked > > Yabause to allow us to use their code. They declined because they felt the GPL > > protected them better than the current MAME license, and so Kale and I ended up > > reinventing tens of thousands of lines of code, much of which is still buggy today. > > In which case I think the license has served a good purpose.
which good purpose? re-inventing the wheel instead of focusing on bugfixes?
EDIT: to elaborate a bit, sharing code with other projects is neither good nor bad per se (sometimes I get irritated by the black&white simplifications done in this discussion). if you don't control what you merge, the source could easily become an unreadable mess, but if you make good use of what others offer the inclusion might add value to the project