> > I'm not sure what at this point is considered stirring things up, kicking a dead > horse, or what, but what exactly is Haze going on about here? Has he opened some sort > of can of worms over his opposing views, is he just being dramatic for effect, or > what...? He makes a vague statement about "seeking legal counsel" and the > (il)legality of mame without any further explanation, and of course, comments > disallowed. I waited a little bit to see if the topic would come up on its own > without having to ask, but...it has not.
Well, the only specific problem he went into with that post is the presence of a ROM directly in the MAME source code. While that probably is a copyright violation, it's an isolated one and apparently not one the rights holder has been too concerned with since it's been there 11 years.
Basically, he's afraid that in the past, MAME has changed its license when it was not legally able to do so because it didn't have the consent of all contributors. I definitely don't know enough about the history of MAME and about copyright law to say whether this is correct. I will say that, when the whole licensing dust-up started, one of the first things I asked myself was why MAMEdev would need to seek the permission of every contributor to change the license of their code, when in the past, the entire MAME license was changed without unanimous consent. But a lot of those changes were smaller than moving to GPL or BSD, so it may not be a perfect comparison.