Drama? It took me 10 seconds to find the information. In future you need to research and find the information, give the link and then supply your review of the events. This would make a better post of talking about something, then having people get the information for you. I find this behaviour rather stupid, but I since kids today cannot think for themselves, I guess we have to give them a break or whatever it is called today.
Nothing is leaked. Some guy had the boards and started to make a big issue about it, and to be fair if a game craps out in a test market and gets canned, well everyone wants it even more.
We have a wonderful guy who dumps the boards, then sells them on after getting financial and physical donations, called the Guru. The Mame devs, by some divine intervention, then take this dump and work it into the Mame core to get it working. After that the ROM mysteriously appears on the internet by some unbelievable act of God. Then the Guru sells the boards on once the dump is "documented". The whole process is a religious experience from start to finish.
Unfortunately the Guru needs to keep the boards in a secure location to give the Mame project some legitimacy, as the process to get the game working requires some security cracking which is against the DMCA.
Since this is the case, it puts the efforts of the project into the legal dark grey area as they do not own the boards for their preservation status and the exception to the DMCA provision, as required to succeed. Still with me?
So it is like buying wii games from Gamestop, dumping all your bought and donated Wii games to a hard disk, sharing them on the internet, and then selling the bought discs back to GameStop. Something tells me that is not a legal gray area..
What it does allow, legally, (IMO) is to repair or provide a platform for rom owners of said copyright content to use the Mame software for commercial purposes for free, in theory.
So in the future can you please just follow a less preachy format like this when you ask questions about drama on the interwebs. Thanks.