Uses for the Ben Nanonote

Jason Self jason at librewrt.org
Thu Aug 12 18:46:46 EDT 2010


Ron K. Jeffries wrote:
> A differing perspective:
>
> From the web site:
>
> "MAME is free. Its source code is free. Selling either is not allowed."

I believe that there is some miscommunication here as to which "free"
they're talking about. I reviewed the license [1] and can confirm that
MAME is proprietary software, due to the inclusion of the first bullet
point that prohibits the software from being used "in a commercial product
or activity."

The ability to use software in a commercial environment is a prerequisite
to being free software [2].

Even if it were free software, I doubt that most (if any) of the software
used with any of these emulators would be, so you're still running
non-free software in the end, even if you're using free software to do it.

[1] http://mamedev.org/license.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html





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