8 ms·

MAME is going completely open-source to be a 'learning tool for developers'

193 points by Impossible 11y ago

spb 11y ago
Does anybody know what license they're going to be going for?
- unwiredben 11y ago
  From looking at their repo, it looks like standard BSD-3-Clause. They've been tagging all the files with license comments at the top as they go through identifying authors and making sure everything is re-licensed consistently.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    from their site "MAME is free. Its source code is free. Selling either is not allowed." Wonder how that works with the BSD-3-Clause?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - duskwuff 11y ago
      That's referring to the old license. The "selling either is not allowed" part is going to go away under new licensing.
    - schoen 11y ago
      I believe that's the old policy prior to the current relicensing effort.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      > Wonder how that works with the BSD-3-Clause? You can put whatever you want in your license. You can say it's based on GPL and add an non-commercial layer on it. You don't have to restrict yourself to licenses already written.
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    I just made a quick browse of the commits and there's a lot of BSD-3 but also GPLv2, so I gather the full MAME project will be GPL licensed, but of course you can use the BSD-3 licensed code in non-GPL licensed projects.
- kstenerud 11y ago
  I got an email about it requesting permission to change the license of my CPU cores. To quote: > (will be BSD3 for core files and BSD3,GPL2 or LGPL2 for drivers/emulators)
  - Lorento 11y ago
    What do you think the feeling among contributors is? Are you happy to change yours? Doesn't GPL effectively prohibit combining it with a closed source commercial product? That suggests you still won't be able to bundle all of MAME with a ROM.
    - gillianseed 11y ago
      >Doesn't GPL effectively prohibit combining it with a closed source commercial product? Well yes, since if you sell it to someone you need to offer them the source code should they want it. However the incentive here (as I understand it) was to allow MAME to be used in museums and the like where they charge an entry fee (thus commercial use), and not in order to make it easy for people to create closed source commercial forks of MAME.
    - byuu 11y ago
      I wasn't happy that GPLv3 wasn't an option, as I am against TiVoization; but I didn't want to throw a wrench in their efforts, so I accepted GPLv2. (The older license was more permissive in my opinion; but a TiVo product was less likely if it couldn't be sold for profit.)
      - SXX 11y ago
        TiVoizaton is bad thing of course, but sadly GPLv3 for example won't let to put any app using this code to App Store. Though weird why don't they at least consider GPLv2 or later as it's give a choice for anyone who may want to maintain GPLv3 forks.
        byuu 11y ago
        > TiVoizaton is bad thing of course, but sadly GPLv3 for example won't let to put any app using this code to App Store. That to me feels like more of a problem with the App Store than with the GPLv3. But, I know that idealism tends to get in the way of pragmatism. I understand why they wanted GPLv2. > Though weird why don't they at least consider GPLv2 or later as it's give a choice for anyone who may want to maintain GPLv3 forks. I might say GPLv2-3, but I'd be worried about saying "or later", when I don't know what the GPLv4 will hold. Yet at the same time, if I did end up liking it, I'd hate to then be stuck on v2-v3 only. Very tough problem.
drewmate 11y ago
How does this work for people who contributed code under one license (thinking it would stay that way) and don't want their contributions released under another license? In practice, I doubt they'll run in to any issues, but what if they wanted to release all the code under a more commercially permissive license and contributors had a problem with that? Does MAME own all contributions? Could they change the license to require license fees? If not, why can they change the license after the fact?
- detaro 11y ago
  Others below mentioned that they are getting permission from their contributors. I guess they checked beforehand how the bulk of them feels to make sure there is not to much they have to rip out and replace if someone objects.
- byuu 11y ago
  I don't know what they are doing for people who are no longer reachable online (deaths, disappearances, etc); but in my case, they reached out to me and asked for (and received) my permission.
- ronjouch 11y ago
  Answering to "why can they change the license after the fact?" , I think the answer is something close to "Licenses can be changed after the fact, provided the owners/maintainers get permission from each contributor, or rewrite the problematic parts". VLC went through a similar transition (from GPL to LGPL); jbkempf's blogposts about this experience may be of interest to you: - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice... - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-2 http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice... - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-3 http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  A project I contributed to recently switched from GPLv3 to MPL. In order to do so they hunted down every single contributor and got their permission.
Crito 11y ago
> "MAME's source code has long been freely available, but it's never technically been open source. Instead it's been available under a modified BSID license that prohibits, among other things, commercial use of the code." Sounds to me that it has long been open source, but not Free software.
- detaro 11y ago
  Yeah, a bit strange wording, but also the language the project uses, because their license wasn't recognized as open source by the Open Source Initiative.
- gillianseed 11y ago
  As I recall this was to prevent the use of MAME in commercial arcade settings, beyond this MAME has a policy where they will only emulate arcade games which haven't had commercial circulation for a number of years. Same goes for the sister project MESS (which has now merged with MAME) that is targeting consoles and computers.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > beyond this MAME has a policy where they will only emulate arcade games which haven't had commercial circulation for a number of years. I wonder how strict they are on that aspect of things, because in Japan you still have a number of arcades with games from the 80s and 90s. Isnt that considered commercial circulation ? Note that such games actually run on some kind of emulators, too. No idea what they use, but they clearly do not use the original hardware anymore.
    - gillianseed 11y ago
      >I wonder how strict they are on that aspect of things, because in Japan you still have a number of arcades with games from the 80s and 90s. Isnt that considered commercial circulation ? By that logic you wouldn't be able to emulate anything, since there are certainly places where old machines are active (as in, coin-operated). I think the policy regarding emulation is something like 2-3 years after manufacturing of said arcade machines have ceased, but I think that is also on a case-by-case basis, as in sometimes they wait quite a bit longer, shoot'em ups from Cave comes to mind.
fsk 11y ago
That is a misleading headline. MAME always was open source, but it was distributed under its own custom license, which forbade distributing it with ROM images. For example, if Nintendo wanted to distribute its Arcade/GB/GBC/GBA/NES/SNES rom images wrapped with MAME, the current license forbids that. The reason for that restriction is that the MAME devs were concerned about getting sued by the copyright holders. That's like saying "Nethack isn't open source", because it has its own custom license rather than one of the more traditional licenses. A lot of older projects have their own custom license, because they started before there were a couple of standardized popular licenses. They plan to switch to a more traditional license. I think they picked the GPL. Their plan is to get permission from all the authors, and rewrite the code of people who don't give permission. Some of the core contributors are POed and refuse to give consent, and they left the project. I'm not sure how rewriting works, since the hard part really was figuring out how to emulate the rom correctly. If you change the variable names, refactor it, but keep the same core logic, does that count as "different"?
- mjg59 11y ago
  No, the reason it wasn't open source wasn't that it had its own custom license, it was that that custom license didn't meet the Open Source Definition. The license didn't forbid distributing it with ROM images, it forbid any form of commercial distribution or use. That's clearly not open source.
  - fsk 11y ago
    I thought there was such a restriction, I read the license and there isn't. http://mamedev.org/legal.html http://mamedev.org/legal.html I thought "open source" just meant "you can read the source". Some people take a stricter definition. I.e., if Microsoft chose to distribute the source code for Windows, but not allow people to sell binaries or modifications, that would be "open source".
    - Nursie 11y ago
      Shared Source was the way MS did this. "Open Source" seems to be a mark granted to a license by the OSI - http://opensource.org/about http://opensource.org/about But I don't know if they have any legal control over the term as a trademark or anything, or if they just give their approval and grant the use of their logo. Interestingly enough (for me anyway) the BSD style licenses don't seem.to meet their definition of "Open Source" but are approved anyway...
gpl2000 11y ago
So I can't use the or borrow the mane source code without triggering a derivative? This whole code base is now forever useless. All of that effort is officially gone to waste.
- 59nadir 11y ago
  How so? Why is it useless?
ekianjo 11y ago
Wow, Gamasutra really has no understanding of Free and Open Source Software concepts. That is really not a good place to announce this kind of things. When you read "going completely open source" and see what it actually means, there's only one appropriate reaction: faceplam.
- byuu 11y ago
  I have tried and tried to get people to acknowledge that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are very different things from "free software" and "open source". Those capitals make all the difference, and I really wish the FSF and OSI would use less ambiguous words. Tell any lay person on the street that MAME wasn't free software, and they'd ask you how much it cost. Tell them it wasn't open source, and they'd assume it meant the source wasn't available (if they even knew what source code was.) But it just devolves into endless arguing over semantics. The ideology gets to be so strong that it's almost like religious dogma. And that's really not helping anyone. Simply stating that MAME was non-commercial would be understood by everyone, and from there you'd be in a perfect position to then explain to people why you felt that all software should be allowed to be sold by anyone for profit. Distro CDs shipping with it, game museums having MAME cabinets set up, etc. Playing word semantics is just going to annoy people not already steeped in the FOSS world. (for what it's worth, I also agreed to relicense my code that's inside MAME to GPLv2 for this new effort, so please don't consider me an enemy of GPL or anything.)
  - foiboitoi 11y ago
    Why hasn't "Free as in Freedom" Software been shortened to just Freedom Software? Or Liberal or Liberty Software? This seems like a simple problem to solve honestly. Given that this issue is still happening after decades... I think it deserves to be addressed.
    - byuu 11y ago
      That's a great question. I've always been partial to "FSF certified" and "OSI certified". Put it right on the organizations that promote the definitions. And it gets those groups extra exposure when people look the terms up. Bonus: we could then pretend FOSS stands for "FSF/OSI Sanctioned Software". They could even get trademarks on those terms, unlike the failed attempt to trademark "open source". > I think it deserves to be addressed. We've gotta get people to budge on this, and see things from the other side. Find a way to do that and I think you could achieve world peace =)
tehchromic 11y ago
glad to hear it. not to start a debate over aesthetics, but I've never been terrible impressed by video game art in museums and galleries - not that the work itself isn't impressive, it's just so hopelessly introverted and codified, that it just hasn't been capable of translating into the gallery/fine art setting yet, in my experience. The two worlds don't undertand eachother, and I'll say the same about 'outsider' art - I never enjoyed it's curation although I've loved the art. I'd love to be proven wrong by someone though, on the video game front, and I'd love that person to be me of course haha, here's to dreaming.
kriro 11y ago
Excellent news. I might buy an arcade machine to put MAME on it then. Friend of mine had two imported from Japan but unfortunately sold them while I wasn't around. It's a ton of fun to play games with actual arcade controls and the good nostalgia feeling. There are also multiple online posts about building your own, maybe I'll do that to be even more open. This is the one that I stil have bookmarked: http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm
- ido 11y ago
  Why does it matter for your use case? Or are you planning on putting it somewhere public, like a bar (so the "no commercial use" term might have kicked in)?
  - kriro 11y ago
    For me, it only matters for a strange use case. We wanted to put one up during a community/neighbourhood festival and it was somewhat icky so we didn't. Would be fun to see them in bars, too. I know at least one patron that'll probably put one up someday.
xchip 11y ago
I guess the MAME guys want to create an itunes for the games, that way companies like Namco and so on can sell their games thought Mame. And the Mame gusy would get a 30% as ususal.

193 points by Impossible 11y ago

spb 11y ago

Does anybody know what license they're going to be going for?

unwiredben 11y ago
From looking at their repo, it looks like standard BSD-3-Clause. They've been tagging all the files with license comments at the top as they go through identifying authors and making sure everything is re-licensed consistently.
- protomyth 11y ago
  from their site "MAME is free. Its source code is free. Selling either is not allowed." Wonder how that works with the BSD-3-Clause?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - duskwuff 11y ago
    That's referring to the old license. The "selling either is not allowed" part is going to go away under new licensing.
  - schoen 11y ago
    I believe that's the old policy prior to the current relicensing effort.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > Wonder how that works with the BSD-3-Clause? You can put whatever you want in your license. You can say it's based on GPL and add an non-commercial layer on it. You don't have to restrict yourself to licenses already written.
- gillianseed 11y ago
  I just made a quick browse of the commits and there's a lot of BSD-3 but also GPLv2, so I gather the full MAME project will be GPL licensed, but of course you can use the BSD-3 licensed code in non-GPL licensed projects.
kstenerud 11y ago
I got an email about it requesting permission to change the license of my CPU cores. To quote: > (will be BSD3 for core files and BSD3,GPL2 or LGPL2 for drivers/emulators)
- Lorento 11y ago
  What do you think the feeling among contributors is? Are you happy to change yours? Doesn't GPL effectively prohibit combining it with a closed source commercial product? That suggests you still won't be able to bundle all of MAME with a ROM.
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    >Doesn't GPL effectively prohibit combining it with a closed source commercial product? Well yes, since if you sell it to someone you need to offer them the source code should they want it. However the incentive here (as I understand it) was to allow MAME to be used in museums and the like where they charge an entry fee (thus commercial use), and not in order to make it easy for people to create closed source commercial forks of MAME.
  - byuu 11y ago
    I wasn't happy that GPLv3 wasn't an option, as I am against TiVoization; but I didn't want to throw a wrench in their efforts, so I accepted GPLv2. (The older license was more permissive in my opinion; but a TiVo product was less likely if it couldn't be sold for profit.)
    - SXX 11y ago
      TiVoizaton is bad thing of course, but sadly GPLv3 for example won't let to put any app using this code to App Store. Though weird why don't they at least consider GPLv2 or later as it's give a choice for anyone who may want to maintain GPLv3 forks.
      - byuu 11y ago
        > TiVoizaton is bad thing of course, but sadly GPLv3 for example won't let to put any app using this code to App Store. That to me feels like more of a problem with the App Store than with the GPLv3. But, I know that idealism tends to get in the way of pragmatism. I understand why they wanted GPLv2. > Though weird why don't they at least consider GPLv2 or later as it's give a choice for anyone who may want to maintain GPLv3 forks. I might say GPLv2-3, but I'd be worried about saying "or later", when I don't know what the GPLv4 will hold. Yet at the same time, if I did end up liking it, I'd hate to then be stuck on v2-v3 only. Very tough problem.

drewmate 11y ago

How does this work for people who contributed code under one license (thinking it would stay that way) and don't want their contributions released under another license? In practice, I doubt they'll run in to any issues, but what if they wanted to release all the code under a more commercially permissive license and contributors had a problem with that? Does MAME own all contributions? Could they change the license to require license fees? If not, why can they change the license after the fact?

detaro 11y ago
Others below mentioned that they are getting permission from their contributors. I guess they checked beforehand how the bulk of them feels to make sure there is not to much they have to rip out and replace if someone objects.
byuu 11y ago
I don't know what they are doing for people who are no longer reachable online (deaths, disappearances, etc); but in my case, they reached out to me and asked for (and received) my permission.
ronjouch 11y ago
Answering to "why can they change the license after the fact?" , I think the answer is something close to "Licenses can be changed after the fact, provided the owners/maintainers get permission from each contributor, or rewrite the problematic parts". VLC went through a similar transition (from GPL to LGPL); jbkempf's blogposts about this experience may be of interest to you: - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice... - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-2 http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice... - http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-3 http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
A project I contributed to recently switched from GPLv3 to MPL. In order to do so they hunted down every single contributor and got their permission.

Crito 11y ago

> "MAME's source code has long been freely available, but it's never technically been open source. Instead it's been available under a modified BSID license that prohibits, among other things, commercial use of the code." Sounds to me that it has long been open source, but not Free software.

detaro 11y ago
Yeah, a bit strange wording, but also the language the project uses, because their license wasn't recognized as open source by the Open Source Initiative.
gillianseed 11y ago
As I recall this was to prevent the use of MAME in commercial arcade settings, beyond this MAME has a policy where they will only emulate arcade games which haven't had commercial circulation for a number of years. Same goes for the sister project MESS (which has now merged with MAME) that is targeting consoles and computers.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > beyond this MAME has a policy where they will only emulate arcade games which haven't had commercial circulation for a number of years. I wonder how strict they are on that aspect of things, because in Japan you still have a number of arcades with games from the 80s and 90s. Isnt that considered commercial circulation ? Note that such games actually run on some kind of emulators, too. No idea what they use, but they clearly do not use the original hardware anymore.
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    >I wonder how strict they are on that aspect of things, because in Japan you still have a number of arcades with games from the 80s and 90s. Isnt that considered commercial circulation ? By that logic you wouldn't be able to emulate anything, since there are certainly places where old machines are active (as in, coin-operated). I think the policy regarding emulation is something like 2-3 years after manufacturing of said arcade machines have ceased, but I think that is also on a case-by-case basis, as in sometimes they wait quite a bit longer, shoot'em ups from Cave comes to mind.

fsk 11y ago

That is a misleading headline. MAME always was open source, but it was distributed under its own custom license, which forbade distributing it with ROM images. For example, if Nintendo wanted to distribute its Arcade/GB/GBC/GBA/NES/SNES rom images wrapped with MAME, the current license forbids that. The reason for that restriction is that the MAME devs were concerned about getting sued by the copyright holders. That's like saying "Nethack isn't open source", because it has its own custom license rather than one of the more traditional licenses. A lot of older projects have their own custom license, because they started before there were a couple of standardized popular licenses. They plan to switch to a more traditional license. I think they picked the GPL. Their plan is to get permission from all the authors, and rewrite the code of people who don't give permission. Some of the core contributors are POed and refuse to give consent, and they left the project. I'm not sure how rewriting works, since the hard part really was figuring out how to emulate the rom correctly. If you change the variable names, refactor it, but keep the same core logic, does that count as "different"?

mjg59 11y ago
No, the reason it wasn't open source wasn't that it had its own custom license, it was that that custom license didn't meet the Open Source Definition. The license didn't forbid distributing it with ROM images, it forbid any form of commercial distribution or use. That's clearly not open source.
- fsk 11y ago
  I thought there was such a restriction, I read the license and there isn't. http://mamedev.org/legal.html http://mamedev.org/legal.html I thought "open source" just meant "you can read the source". Some people take a stricter definition. I.e., if Microsoft chose to distribute the source code for Windows, but not allow people to sell binaries or modifications, that would be "open source".
  - Nursie 11y ago
    Shared Source was the way MS did this. "Open Source" seems to be a mark granted to a license by the OSI - http://opensource.org/about http://opensource.org/about But I don't know if they have any legal control over the term as a trademark or anything, or if they just give their approval and grant the use of their logo. Interestingly enough (for me anyway) the BSD style licenses don't seem.to meet their definition of "Open Source" but are approved anyway...

gpl2000 11y ago

So I can't use the or borrow the mane source code without triggering a derivative? This whole code base is now forever useless. All of that effort is officially gone to waste.

59nadir 11y ago
How so? Why is it useless?

ekianjo 11y ago

Wow, Gamasutra really has no understanding of Free and Open Source Software concepts. That is really not a good place to announce this kind of things. When you read "going completely open source" and see what it actually means, there's only one appropriate reaction: faceplam.

byuu 11y ago
I have tried and tried to get people to acknowledge that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are very different things from "free software" and "open source". Those capitals make all the difference, and I really wish the FSF and OSI would use less ambiguous words. Tell any lay person on the street that MAME wasn't free software, and they'd ask you how much it cost. Tell them it wasn't open source, and they'd assume it meant the source wasn't available (if they even knew what source code was.) But it just devolves into endless arguing over semantics. The ideology gets to be so strong that it's almost like religious dogma. And that's really not helping anyone. Simply stating that MAME was non-commercial would be understood by everyone, and from there you'd be in a perfect position to then explain to people why you felt that all software should be allowed to be sold by anyone for profit. Distro CDs shipping with it, game museums having MAME cabinets set up, etc. Playing word semantics is just going to annoy people not already steeped in the FOSS world. (for what it's worth, I also agreed to relicense my code that's inside MAME to GPLv2 for this new effort, so please don't consider me an enemy of GPL or anything.)
- foiboitoi 11y ago
  Why hasn't "Free as in Freedom" Software been shortened to just Freedom Software? Or Liberal or Liberty Software? This seems like a simple problem to solve honestly. Given that this issue is still happening after decades... I think it deserves to be addressed.
  - byuu 11y ago
    That's a great question. I've always been partial to "FSF certified" and "OSI certified". Put it right on the organizations that promote the definitions. And it gets those groups extra exposure when people look the terms up. Bonus: we could then pretend FOSS stands for "FSF/OSI Sanctioned Software". They could even get trademarks on those terms, unlike the failed attempt to trademark "open source". > I think it deserves to be addressed. We've gotta get people to budge on this, and see things from the other side. Find a way to do that and I think you could achieve world peace =)

tehchromic 11y ago

glad to hear it. not to start a debate over aesthetics, but I've never been terrible impressed by video game art in museums and galleries - not that the work itself isn't impressive, it's just so hopelessly introverted and codified, that it just hasn't been capable of translating into the gallery/fine art setting yet, in my experience. The two worlds don't undertand eachother, and I'll say the same about 'outsider' art - I never enjoyed it's curation although I've loved the art. I'd love to be proven wrong by someone though, on the video game front, and I'd love that person to be me of course haha, here's to dreaming.

kriro 11y ago

Excellent news. I might buy an arcade machine to put MAME on it then. Friend of mine had two imported from Japan but unfortunately sold them while I wasn't around. It's a ton of fun to play games with actual arcade controls and the good nostalgia feeling. There are also multiple online posts about building your own, maybe I'll do that to be even more open. This is the one that I stil have bookmarked: http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/stepprojectmame.htm

ido 11y ago
Why does it matter for your use case? Or are you planning on putting it somewhere public, like a bar (so the "no commercial use" term might have kicked in)?
- kriro 11y ago
  For me, it only matters for a strange use case. We wanted to put one up during a community/neighbourhood festival and it was somewhat icky so we didn't. Would be fun to see them in bars, too. I know at least one patron that'll probably put one up someday.

xchip 11y ago

I guess the MAME guys want to create an itunes for the games, that way companies like Namco and so on can sell their games thought Mame. And the Mame gusy would get a 30% as ususal.