Sounds like the museum complaint is just an excuse. Educational purposes shouldn't be considered commercial and if they are restricted by the license, then it is a simple matter of some minor exclusions being written into the current license.
If it is moved to commercial, then do all coders involved get royalties? Seems like the move would be a huge legal snafu, being that it was not created by paid employees.
Again I stress, a license that permits commercial use doesn't mean Mamedev will be selling it. It does mean anybody else can sell it tho.
I agree, it's going too far, and that we could simply agree to exemptions to the license clause for such uses (if needed) on a per case basis. Also simply reworking the license to indicate we approve of such uses would be a lot more acceptable than reworking it into one that means anybody can sell MAME, charge people to use MAME, bundle up MAME with their own 5 minute hack-job frontend and pretend it's not MAME but the worlds greatest arcade emulator and sell that (as long as they have a source linked tucked away somewhere) or whatever else they want.
Like I've said, I've always considered this an academic project, one of cultural significance, that has been the reason for my contributions over the years. I know people ARE making money off it, but we don't approve of that and our existing license makes that very clear.
I've updated my post to reflect the main beef I have with the way this is being done. If I was being entirely selfish about this I wouldn't really even care that much, because by the logic proposed it does put ME in a position to deny the use of many many drivers due to my personal disagreement with the new terms.
My issue is that it's completely inconsiderate of the views of the hundreds and thousands of other contributors who have made tweaks and improvements to drivers over the years. Somebody like Howard here who has hooked up the lamps in various drivers is likely to be considered a 'minor contribution' and his opinion on how his code was used in the future would apparently not matter because he is not one of the primary contributors to the driver. Personally I feel that is illegal. Howard submitted his code under the MAME license, he would have to agree for the license on the code he submitted to be changed. Multiply that across the entire project and you've got hundreds of lower-level contributors who are going to have a fundamental part of the license (permitting commercial use) on their code changed against their will and without proper consultation. This would make all MAME versions with the replaced license information flat out illegal (surely defeating the very objective of allowing commercial use!)
As I've also mentioned on my page, the attitude demonstrated was that the people who have worked on drivers don't matter either if they won't agree. The hard work they've put into it (and figuring things out in the first place is always the hardest part of emulation) will simply be taken and 'rewritten' in new files, with the person who actually figured everything out having no say at all. While legally this part is fine I find it to be morally corrupt with a team, and basically a FU to the people who have spent years working this out. Some of the hardest work in the project has been done by people like Charles MacDonald who have barely a line of code to their name.
MAME would not be MAME without the work of all these people. We can't suddenly ignore them and pretend that smaller contributions are unimportant as far as the licensing goes; sometimes it's the one line change that's the difference between working and not working even.
This annoyed me more initially because it was even said that anybody who didn't make an effort to claim their code within 30 days would automatically be assumed to agree with the change. At least that part was shot down, but the rest needs shooting down too.
Aaron is being very bullish over this change, and I don't see how it is actually any good for anybody. While I do feel something like Museums are a worthy cause I agree that it is being used as an excuse to make far more broadly reaching changes. I feel the only CLEAN way aaron can do this is to take the bits of code that he is the sole contributor for and start a fresh project, none of the MAME drivers can be considered clean because many of them predate even SVN records to show exactly who worked on them.
You see the issue?
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Topic: "MAMEdev are *aggressively* trying to move to a commercial license" What??? (Read 18394 times)
