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MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License (mamedev.org)

Posted by timothy on from the kids-and-mothers-are-for-cereal dept.

New submitter _merlin writes: MAMEdev just announced that MAME (formerly Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is now entirely available under OSI-comliant, FSF-approved licenses. The project as a whole is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0), while individual source files are available under BSD-3-Clause, LGPL-2.1 or GPL-2.0 (all compatible with GPL-2.0). Over 90% of the code, including core functionality, is available under the BSD-3-Clause license.

1 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Re: What was it before? by _merlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was previously a license based on the BSD-3-Clause license with additional terms prohibiting commercial use, distribution alongside unauthorised ROM images, and certain kinds of derivative builds. This caused it to fall afoul of OSI and FSF rules. It also tended to hurt potential legitimate users (e.g. rights holders wanting to re-release classics) while doing nothing to stop software pirates and arcade game bootleggers.

    This change also makes it easier for other F/L/OSS projects to leverage MAME code, and may help get MAME accepted by F/L/OSS software distribution services (such as main package repositories for major Linux distributions).

    Note that MAME is a registered trademark, and the are still restrictions on use of the MAME name, logo and wordmark.