Mame's announcement of freedom:
After 19 years, MAME [originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator -Ed.] is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!
We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.
As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.
MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions.
[This pertains strictly to the MAME software itself; getting ROM images that would run on MAME is a separate matter. -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @03:14PM
Lousy description of what it is or how it's strung together. "This pertains strictly to the MAME software itself" doesn't help.
(Score: 2) by n1 on Wednesday March 09 2016, @03:24PM
I don't disagree but they whole summary is just quotes from the MAME development team themselves, so if they can't explain it clearly, I don't know how we're supposed to. The latter quote is directly pulled from the "What is MAME?" on their projects front page.
(Score: 1) by helel on Wednesday March 09 2016, @05:00PM
Really the summery should include that MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator at least once. By my estimate this would help explain the project much better then the description given.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @06:31PM
Really the summery should include that MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator at least once.
But what should the wintery include?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @07:07PM
It should include some snowy, but what with global warmy and all...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @06:01PM
I hear you. The submission shoulda been better, and the editor coulda used the editorial privilege/discretion to improve it, but then I shoulda won the lottery.
(Score: 2) by n1 on Wednesday March 09 2016, @07:14PM
The second quote and then the editor's note were both additions by myself and another editor beyond the original submission, but yes, we still could have done better.