Felipe Sanches: >I think MAME is likely not compatible with the free sw distro >guidelines. ignoring the trademark; as a whole, mame is in the same category as wine, which is allowed. but most parts of it are in the same category as ndiswrapper; i don't think this parts should be allowed just because they are bundled together.
>I think shipping a prebuilt binary package of MAME is >not really useful for **most** of the things that MAME is useful other >than playing non-free games. ... >I still think that MAME is a very useful asset for education on >electronics, hardware design, reverse engineering techniques, and >similar topics as well as for the historical preservation of our >technological legacy (even if it's a legacy of mostly non-free >programs, we still must not "burn books", right?). i think the argument here is "obsolete interfaces are useful by themselves". this imply reversing the decision on ndiswrapper. this is a valid approach (eliminating false negative errors)[1] but probably not the best way to protect freedom. >I will try not to talk here any more, unless I >have something really new to say. i will probably continue replying while people are quoting me and making proposals or confusing general-purpose runtime dependencies with tools for reverse engineering without understanding the consequences. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_negative_error
