> > If it is I'm not sure how I feel > > about the change. Mind you the think the arcade piracy scene in terms of commercial > > use is kind of dead, but it's the principal of the thing more than anything else. > > The dirty secret of MAME licensing has always been that MAMEdev can't afford to sue > anybody, so in reality the effective license was always BSD-3-Clause. > > Other factors, in no particular order: > > - MAME's license has prevented us from doing any commercial emulations, so we get to > sit around and watch the likes of DotEmu stick end users (ourselves included) with > crap. > - MAME's license has been problematic for museums and libraries that charge admission > but aren't actually for-profit. > - In 2005, it was reasonable for MAMEdev to want additional protection from > Sega/Konami/Capcom/Taito. In 2015, Smit is going to be holding a DU fundraiser to buy > the shambling corpses of those companies as they become available.
Well it's certainly true that they couldn't sue anybody BUT the fear of doing something illegal keeps 90% of the would-be bootleggers at bay. Now that this is gone, I'm not sure what the consequences are going to be.
That's the thing I'm concerned about right there, joking aside. With a free, ready-made emulator made available what is stopping someone from, say, buying the rights to all the konami games and essentially selling mame as the "Konami collection" Mind you that might not be a bad thing considering the current state of "official" releases by companies, I just wonder about legal ramifications.
The other thing I worry about is now that you can sell mame, people might not contribute source code to the main build and will make a custom build of mame and sell it.