Felipe Sanches: >On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 3:36 PM, alírio eyng <address@hidden> wrote: >> Tobias Platen: >>> Emulators can be useful for reverse engineering ... >> emulators are the _result_ of reverse engineering, not tools to do it. ... >I completely disagree! >I have been actively using MAME to perform reverse engineering of >non-free firmware for a bit more than a couple years. this is missing the point. you are using mame to _run_ non-free firmware and performing reverse engineering on a running non-free firmware. but if we support running non-free software (or firmware) on an emulator there's no point in not supporting non-free software outside it. e.g. skype because i can say its useful to run skype to reverse engineer it, and this is true.
free distros choose the compromise of making this a little harder by not supporting nonfree software so people are not mislead in using it. but it is still reasonably easy to opt-out of the free distro whitelist and use nonfree software if wanted.
