MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

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.

It was actually a pretty herculean effort to fix the licensing in MAME. It's been at least a year since I got email asking for the licensing in my cores to be switched over. They had to get an OK from everyone involved, or rewrite portions of it.

This was way, way overdue. For much of its life, MAME was a total mess of license restrictions. Just knowing that a file was in MAME didn&#x27;t really yield much reliable information about how it was licensed. Some parts of the code were under seriously weird terms, including e.g. an assertion of the &quot;right&quot; to change the license terms <i>retroactively</i> (said license also refers to the code as &quot;copywritten&quot;...).<p>Kudos to the team for sorting it out, and to all the old contributors who agreed to relicense their code where necessary.

Nice. Maybe we&#x27;ll see some legal &quot;arcade collections&quot; from publishers who can now ship their own versions of MAME.

I&#x27;m curious why they changed from noncommercial permissive to GPL2+ instead of GPL3.<p>If their goal is to prevent misuse of the project by unethical profit-minded entities, GPL3&#x27;s anti-tivoization language would have ensured that even if a company profits from building or running a MAME-based cabinet (which is good!), they wouldn&#x27;t be able to deprive their customers&#x27; freedom to fix or upgrade the software that runs it. (As they now can!)<p>It&#x27;s even worse for the permissively-licensed parts of the code, which can now be used to build locked-down proprietary cabinets that users can&#x27;t even inspect. I&#x27;m glad they got at least part of the project covered by copyleft.<p>The &quot;common questions&quot; on their site contains some confusing claims, too:<p>&gt; Q. Can I include MAME with my product? &gt; A. Yes. You can use 3-clause BSD compliant files but project as whole is under GPL-2.0 license so in case you wish to use those part you need approval from specific developers.<p>You&#x27;d only need permission if you didn&#x27;t want to comply with the terms of GPL2. There&#x27;s nothing in GPL2 that requires permission for inclusion with a product.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s just leftover from before the license change?

I love Mame. I use it to play several games that aren&#x27;t available otherwise.

Off topic, but does anyone know why I get a &#x27;403 Forbidden&#x27; error when opening this site from China?

If you&#x27;re up to version 0.171 maybe it&#x27;s OK to use something like 1.7.1

Wait... It... Wasn&#x27;t?

Oh yeah

Now I can&#x27;t get this out of my head, darn it!<p><pre><code> You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame, You charm the husk right off of the corn, Mame, You&#x27;ve got that banjoes strummin&#x27; And plunkin&#x27; out a tune to beat the band, The whole plantation&#x27;s hummin&#x27; Since you brought Dixie back to Dixie land. </code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mjZ7UwHaY8g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mjZ7UwHaY8g</a>