7 ms·

I'm blown away that it was not free and open source already. I remember downloading it. I remember using it. I remember poking through the source at one poin

by Gratsby 11y ago

I'm blown away that it was not free and open source already. I remember downloading it. I remember using it. I remember poking through the source at one point. If it was proprietary software, it had the worst marketing program ever. I had absolutely no idea there was any sort of paid alternative.

dyladan 11y ago
I'm not familiar with the project but it sounds to me more like they just relicensed it with a free as in freedom license. Not that it is just becoming open source.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
It was formerly under a miscellaneous collection of licenses that included many "non-commercial use only" licenses (common in the emulator world at the time, partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use, and partly because some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets).
- cbhl 11y ago
  > commercial MAME arcade cabinets These are basically trivial now with Raspberry Pis, right?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Depends on the game you want to run and how much performance its engine needs. Some games would probably run fine on a Pi; some games would need a more powerful system. Some arcade systems supported by MAME have more processing power and specialized hardware than the Pi itself, even before taking into account the overhead of emulation. But beyond that, a commercial MAME cabinet would require ROMs. People have built unofficial cabinets of questionable legality incorporating a pile of ROMs, but a commercial cabinet would require actually licensing specific games.
    - 0x0 11y ago
      In particular, some of the 3dfx emulating machines etc are absolutely brutal on the CPU for emulation
      - ZenoArrow 11y ago
        Sorry, I downvoted you by accident, can someone else please upvote to correct this.
        alinhan 11y ago
        Done.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      It's also worth noting that the main goal with the MAME project is preservation, which means that the focus is on the accuracy of emulation rather than the speed of emulation. There are other arcade emulators that offer faster emulation speeds for the games they support, such as Final Burn Alpha for Capcom and NeoGeo arcade games.
  - LordKano 11y ago
    The Pi doesn't have the power to run some games. I ran into problems with NeoGeo games.
    - khedoros 11y ago
      Were they borderline performance issues, or were speeds off by an order of magnitude? Would they run acceptably on a Pi3 (about 1.5x a Pi2 and 10x a Pi1)? What about an ODroid-C2 (about 1.5x the speed of the Pi3)? Nintendo64 and Playstation emulation on ARM SBCs is probably in a similar state, for a lot of games. Some games will run beautifully, some will be hopelessly slow.
      - LordKano 11y ago
        Completely unplayable on a Pi2. When it didn't do the hardware bootup after 5 minutes, I gave up. Maybe the ODroid could make it happen but the Pi2 simply cannot.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Sorry, I downvoted you by accident, can someone else please upvote to correct this.
- computator 11y ago
  > partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use I don't understand what you mean. Why is it bad to draw attention here? > some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets Why do you suppose that is? It's infuriating to see someone else make a lot of money with something you developed for free? Surely the world would have been a better place if they allowed all commercial use. Someone would have put marketing money into MAME arcade cabinets, etc., and a lot more people would be using it and aware of it.
  - 0x0 11y ago
    > I don't understand what you mean. Why is drawing attention is bad in this case? They probably didn't want commercial coin-op arcade venues setting up shop operating with MAME machines
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Some people were selling MAME and full romsets on DVD. A few people were distributing romsets for the cost of postage and a few DVDs, but others were selling it for larger amounts of money. This meant the copyright holders were paying attention to MAME. MAME didn't want to deal with the lawyers, and wanted to try to stop this piracy.
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    Some of the people who wrote the games on ROMs get upset when they are available for free or sold on the Internet without paying them royalties. The source code of MAME was done by reverse engineering the ROMs to figure out how they work and emulate the hardware in the arcade machines. MAME emulates a lot of processors and special chips and not all of the code was available for commercial use. It has to be rewritten so that it was different code. If I recall MESS is included with MAME now as part of some merge. https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess The JSMESS project has been integrated into the upstream MAME repository at https://github.com/mamedev/mame https://github.com/mamedev/mame and this repository is now defunct. Follow the instructions at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mamedev/mame/master/docs/emscripten.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mamedev/mame/master/docs/e... to do an Emscripten compile with unmodified MAME source.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  > some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets Naturally, the license didn't stop some companies. This included purpose-built ARM-based arcade boards running MAME, to which MAMEDev responded in the most MAMEDev way possible: by cracking their encryption and adding them to MAME as bootleg sets [1]. [1] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/39in1.cpp https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...
oddevan 11y ago
Not paid, quite the opposite. From http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Is_MAME_Open_Source%3f http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Is_MAME_Open_Source%3f (pasted here in case the page changes soon): > MAME's License is a modified version of the standard BSD license. The primary modification is that we do not allow commercial distribution or use of MAME, in order to limit some of the obvious abuses of the code. Because of this modification, MAME's license does not fall under the definition of an Open Source (uppercase) license. This is one of the reasons you don't see the MAME source code hosted on sites such as SourceForge. > Confusingly, MAME is often referred to as open source (lowercase), as its development shares much in common with other open source projects. However, in spite of its freely available source code, MAME may not be used in a commercial setting, as specified by its license.
- gauravagarwalr 11y ago
  Sounds like Copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL.
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    No, the GPL family of licenses do not forbid commercial distribution.
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    Definitely more restrictive than the GPL. Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. Even resell for money, and definitely use in commercial setting.
    - mystikal 11y ago
      > Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. Except develop the software however they want.
      - cyphar 11y ago
        > > Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. > Except develop the software however they want. I don't know where you got that idea from. You can develop the software however you like. That's a technical question. The only requirement is that people you distribute your software to must also get the source code. The GPL's job is to protect user's freedom. The developers don't get any special treatment.
5ilv3r 11y ago
I believe it was open source, but the licenses were not 'free' enough to be called free software.
- hannob 11y ago
  This is a misunderstanding of the term "open source". It also doesn't allow restrictions and means basically the same as free software, just with different political intentions. The source was available. But it was neither open source nor free software. Now it is.
  - wallacoloo 11y ago
    Your comment surprised me a bit, so I did some quick Wikipedia searching. From what I can tell, "open source" does indeed mean "the source code is freely accessible." From Wikipedia: > Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. [1] I think what you are referring to are "OSI Approved Licenses" (OSI = Open Source Initiative, which is an entity). The OSI defines its Open Source Definition which sounds very much like yours. Importantly, the following sentence can be found in the Wikipedia article describing open source licenses: > One popular set of open-source software licenses are those approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) based on their Open Source Definition (OSD). [2] Sure, "don't use Wikipedia as a reference". But we're dealing with colloquialism here, so I think it's actually pretty accurate. Colloquially, it seems that "open source" != "OSI approved". I have seen people capitalize "Open Source" in an attempt to indicate that they're referring the Open Source Definition, but this is confusing in my opinion, and it really would be more clear to just say "OSI approved". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license#OSI_approved_licenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license#OSI_approv...
    - FigBug 11y ago
      The term 'open source' wasn't used before 1998 and the OSI popularized the term, so originally at least when people said open source they meant an OSI approved license. The term has become slightly less precise over time. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&year_start=1980&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Copen%20source%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ye...
mattl 11y ago
It had published source code, but a restriction against commercial usage, making it neither free software nor open source, according to the definitions of such things.
Sleaker 11y ago
it was open and free, just not fully considered FOSS because it had non-commercial clauses on it's usage. Oddly, the MAME homepage still tries to give the impression that you can't use the software commercially. This is incorrect on all accounts. The only thing you can't do is use the MAME trademark, and their new logo isn't even registered yet, the only thing that is registered is a generic text moniker MAME. But that can't stop someone from forking the project and removing relevant trademarks and renaming it to a different product.
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  > Oddly, the MAME homepage still tries to give the impression that you can't use the software commercially. What do you mean? I haven't really looked too deep into the site, but the homepage and download pages at least don't really say anything that would give me that impression.
- bad_user 11y ago
  Restrictions on distribution is not open or free in my book. The trademark issue I get, other projects have done it too, but that was OK because Open Source means you can always fork it. The non-commercial clause on redistribution is another thing entirely, going against the spirit of both Free Software and Open Source (Freedoms 0 and 2 for the further, Rules 1 and 6 for the later). And sadly, no, you can't fork your way from such a clause.
  - uxp 11y ago
    I think what Sleaker was trying to imply with this comment: > it was open and free, just not fully considered FOSS is that MAME was open (the source code was published, and updates were continually amended to that publication) and free (the developers of MAME did not charge a fee for using, reading or otherwise obtaining either the source code or compiled binaries). Whether or not there were additional restrictions on how you could use it (freedom of use) is somewhat tangental to their point. Additionally, as you can observe, both "open" and "free" are lowercase variants of the words, where as you write "Free Software" and "Open Source", which are capitalized pronouns. Open Source and software that is distributed openly as source code are different, but they are cut from the same cloth. Being pedantic doesn't help anyone.

by Gratsby 11y ago

dyladan 11y ago

I'm not familiar with the project but it sounds to me more like they just relicensed it with a free as in freedom license. Not that it is just becoming open source.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

It was formerly under a miscellaneous collection of licenses that included many "non-commercial use only" licenses (common in the emulator world at the time, partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use, and partly because some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets).

cbhl 11y ago
> commercial MAME arcade cabinets These are basically trivial now with Raspberry Pis, right?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Depends on the game you want to run and how much performance its engine needs. Some games would probably run fine on a Pi; some games would need a more powerful system. Some arcade systems supported by MAME have more processing power and specialized hardware than the Pi itself, even before taking into account the overhead of emulation. But beyond that, a commercial MAME cabinet would require ROMs. People have built unofficial cabinets of questionable legality incorporating a pile of ROMs, but a commercial cabinet would require actually licensing specific games.
  - 0x0 11y ago
    In particular, some of the 3dfx emulating machines etc are absolutely brutal on the CPU for emulation
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Sorry, I downvoted you by accident, can someone else please upvote to correct this.
      - alinhan 11y ago
        Done.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    It's also worth noting that the main goal with the MAME project is preservation, which means that the focus is on the accuracy of emulation rather than the speed of emulation. There are other arcade emulators that offer faster emulation speeds for the games they support, such as Final Burn Alpha for Capcom and NeoGeo arcade games.
- LordKano 11y ago
  The Pi doesn't have the power to run some games. I ran into problems with NeoGeo games.
  - khedoros 11y ago
    Were they borderline performance issues, or were speeds off by an order of magnitude? Would they run acceptably on a Pi3 (about 1.5x a Pi2 and 10x a Pi1)? What about an ODroid-C2 (about 1.5x the speed of the Pi3)? Nintendo64 and Playstation emulation on ARM SBCs is probably in a similar state, for a lot of games. Some games will run beautifully, some will be hopelessly slow.
    - LordKano 11y ago
      Completely unplayable on a Pi2. When it didn't do the hardware bootup after 5 minutes, I gave up. Maybe the ODroid could make it happen but the Pi2 simply cannot.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Sorry, I downvoted you by accident, can someone else please upvote to correct this.
computator 11y ago
> partly out of concern for drawing attention over commercial use I don't understand what you mean. Why is it bad to draw attention here? > some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets Why do you suppose that is? It's infuriating to see someone else make a lot of money with something you developed for free? Surely the world would have been a better place if they allowed all commercial use. Someone would have put marketing money into MAME arcade cabinets, etc., and a lot more people would be using it and aware of it.
- 0x0 11y ago
  > I don't understand what you mean. Why is drawing attention is bad in this case? They probably didn't want commercial coin-op arcade venues setting up shop operating with MAME machines
- DanBC 11y ago
  Some people were selling MAME and full romsets on DVD. A few people were distributing romsets for the cost of postage and a few DVDs, but others were selling it for larger amounts of money. This meant the copyright holders were paying attention to MAME. MAME didn't want to deal with the lawyers, and wanted to try to stop this piracy.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  Some of the people who wrote the games on ROMs get upset when they are available for free or sold on the Internet without paying them royalties. The source code of MAME was done by reverse engineering the ROMs to figure out how they work and emulate the hardware in the arcade machines. MAME emulates a lot of processors and special chips and not all of the code was available for commercial use. It has to be rewritten so that it was different code. If I recall MESS is included with MAME now as part of some merge. https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess The JSMESS project has been integrated into the upstream MAME repository at https://github.com/mamedev/mame https://github.com/mamedev/mame and this repository is now defunct. Follow the instructions at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mamedev/mame/master/docs/emscripten.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mamedev/mame/master/docs/e... to do an Emscripten compile with unmodified MAME source.
0xcde4c3db 11y ago
> some contributors didn't want to see commercial MAME arcade cabinets Naturally, the license didn't stop some companies. This included purpose-built ARM-based arcade boards running MAME, to which MAMEDev responded in the most MAMEDev way possible: by cracking their encryption and adding them to MAME as bootleg sets [1]. [1] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/39in1.cpp https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...

oddevan 11y ago

Not paid, quite the opposite. From http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Is_MAME_Open_Source%3f http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Is_MAME_Open_Source%3f (pasted here in case the page changes soon): > MAME's License is a modified version of the standard BSD license. The primary modification is that we do not allow commercial distribution or use of MAME, in order to limit some of the obvious abuses of the code. Because of this modification, MAME's license does not fall under the definition of an Open Source (uppercase) license. This is one of the reasons you don't see the MAME source code hosted on sites such as SourceForge. > Confusingly, MAME is often referred to as open source (lowercase), as its development shares much in common with other open source projects. However, in spite of its freely available source code, MAME may not be used in a commercial setting, as specified by its license.

gauravagarwalr 11y ago
Sounds like Copyleft licenses like GPL and LGPL.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  No, the GPL family of licenses do not forbid commercial distribution.
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  Definitely more restrictive than the GPL. Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. Even resell for money, and definitely use in commercial setting.
  - mystikal 11y ago
    > Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. Except develop the software however they want.
    - cyphar 11y ago
      > > Crucially, a user of GPL software is allowed to do whatever they want. > Except develop the software however they want. I don't know where you got that idea from. You can develop the software however you like. That's a technical question. The only requirement is that people you distribute your software to must also get the source code. The GPL's job is to protect user's freedom. The developers don't get any special treatment.

5ilv3r 11y ago

I believe it was open source, but the licenses were not 'free' enough to be called free software.

hannob 11y ago
This is a misunderstanding of the term "open source". It also doesn't allow restrictions and means basically the same as free software, just with different political intentions. The source was available. But it was neither open source nor free software. Now it is.
- wallacoloo 11y ago
  Your comment surprised me a bit, so I did some quick Wikipedia searching. From what I can tell, "open source" does indeed mean "the source code is freely accessible." From Wikipedia: > Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. [1] I think what you are referring to are "OSI Approved Licenses" (OSI = Open Source Initiative, which is an entity). The OSI defines its Open Source Definition which sounds very much like yours. Importantly, the following sentence can be found in the Wikipedia article describing open source licenses: > One popular set of open-source software licenses are those approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) based on their Open Source Definition (OSD). [2] Sure, "don't use Wikipedia as a reference". But we're dealing with colloquialism here, so I think it's actually pretty accurate. Colloquially, it seems that "open source" != "OSI approved". I have seen people capitalize "Open Source" in an attempt to indicate that they're referring the Open Source Definition, but this is confusing in my opinion, and it really would be more clear to just say "OSI approved". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license#OSI_approved_licenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license#OSI_approv...
  - FigBug 11y ago
    The term 'open source' wasn't used before 1998 and the OSI popularized the term, so originally at least when people said open source they meant an OSI approved license. The term has become slightly less precise over time. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&year_start=1980&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Copen%20source%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ye...

mattl 11y ago

It had published source code, but a restriction against commercial usage, making it neither free software nor open source, according to the definitions of such things.

Sleaker 11y ago

it was open and free, just not fully considered FOSS because it had non-commercial clauses on it's usage. Oddly, the MAME homepage still tries to give the impression that you can't use the software commercially. This is incorrect on all accounts. The only thing you can't do is use the MAME trademark, and their new logo isn't even registered yet, the only thing that is registered is a generic text moniker MAME. But that can't stop someone from forking the project and removing relevant trademarks and renaming it to a different product.

mynameisvlad 11y ago
> Oddly, the MAME homepage still tries to give the impression that you can't use the software commercially. What do you mean? I haven't really looked too deep into the site, but the homepage and download pages at least don't really say anything that would give me that impression.
bad_user 11y ago
Restrictions on distribution is not open or free in my book. The trademark issue I get, other projects have done it too, but that was OK because Open Source means you can always fork it. The non-commercial clause on redistribution is another thing entirely, going against the spirit of both Free Software and Open Source (Freedoms 0 and 2 for the further, Rules 1 and 6 for the later). And sadly, no, you can't fork your way from such a clause.
- uxp 11y ago
  I think what Sleaker was trying to imply with this comment: > it was open and free, just not fully considered FOSS is that MAME was open (the source code was published, and updates were continually amended to that publication) and free (the developers of MAME did not charge a fee for using, reading or otherwise obtaining either the source code or compiled binaries). Whether or not there were additional restrictions on how you could use it (freedom of use) is somewhat tangental to their point. Additionally, as you can observe, both "open" and "free" are lowercase variants of the words, where as you write "Free Software" and "Open Source", which are capitalized pronouns. Open Source and software that is distributed openly as source code are different, but they are cut from the same cloth. Being pedantic doesn't help anyone.