Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

Felipe Sanches:
>I think MAME is likely not compatible with the free sw distro
>guidelines.
ignoring the trademark; as a whole, mame is in the same category as
wine, which is allowed.
but most parts of it are in the same category as ndiswrapper; i don't
think this parts should be allowed just because they are bundled
together.

>I think shipping a prebuilt binary package of MAME is
>not really useful for **most** of the things that MAME is useful other
>than playing non-free games.
...
>I still think that MAME is a very useful asset for education on
>electronics, hardware design, reverse engineering techniques, and
>similar topics as well as for the historical preservation of our
>technological legacy (even if it's a legacy of mostly non-free
>programs, we still must not "burn books", right?).
i think the argument here is "obsolete interfaces are useful by themselves".
this imply reversing the decision on ndiswrapper.
this is a valid approach (eliminating false negative errors)[1] but
probably not the best way to protect freedom.

>I will try not to talk here any more, unless I
>have something really new to say.
i will probably continue replying while people are quoting me and
making proposals or confusing general-purpose runtime dependencies
with tools for reverse engineering without understanding the
consequences.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_negative_error