Dohhh ? Isn't that like claiming that Floppies are obsolete since no software is delivered on floppies any more ??
Actually, floppies pretty much are obsolete, not only because no new software comes on floppies, but also because it's so incredibly easy to move data from your floppies to a much more reliable CD.
Then again, this also illustrates why floppy drives are being taken out of new PCs, but serial ports, PS/2 ports, and parallel ports aren't. Mediums for holding data can have their files easily transferred over to new mediums, but printers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, and other old hardware are not so easily, nor cheaply replaced. And besides, moving from a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to a USB keyboard and mouse gives you no additional performance, whereas moving from floppies to CD-Rs is a huge leap in performance and usefulness.
Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The/. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.
Would it be fair to redistribute songs which we downloaded for 99 cents to millions of people using Kazaa?
"Fair" doesn't really enter into the equation. The relationship between businesses and consumers works in pretty much the same way that any deal between two businesses does. We both work solely for our own interests and try to get as much as we can, and a good compromise is naturally created from that. Right now, we're getting a sweet deal from piracy and telling the RIAA "Make us an offer", and all they're coming back with is "We'll give you 50% less than the other guy!". Well, that just isn't good enough. They have to either make us a better offer or step aside while we either stick with piracy or find companies that can offer us something worthwhile.
They're not thinking of this in terms of how they can be fair to the consumer, so we shouldn't be thinking of this in terms of how we can be fair to the RIAA. They work for their agenda, we work for ours. I know it sounds mean-spirited, but it's just the rules of the game. It's the way that businesses and consumers have always worked with each other, especially since the industrial revolution.
All DRM schemes are horribly misguided because they make it difficult/unpleasant to be honest, because they are easily circumvented, and because only a few people need to circumvent them for the whole world to benefit.
Exactly. There's a new rule of business that came with the internet that a lot of businesses haven't figured out yet: If the pirate version of something is substantially better than the version that you buy in the store, anyone with the means to get the pirate version will choose it. It applies to music, to movies, to games... just about any form of entertainment. Many (most?) people don't mind paying $15-$40 (depending on the product) for their entertainment, but when they're forced to choose between a $15-$40 product and a free version of the same product that has more features and less hassle, they start to think differently.
90% of the NYT stories that Slashdot posts can be viewed without registration through a deal that the New York Times has with Asahi.com. You can see the listing of stories here.
Not so much, it's the perverbial Gillete syndrome. Ms sells the Xbox cheaper than it costs to produce in the plan that owners will buy the highly profitable games.
That's one major factor in their business model. One of the other major factors is that if they don't have a large installed user base, no one will make games for them and the system will die a slow death. Right now, the lack of a large installed user base is forcing Konami to stop selling X-Box games in Japan and Sega to stop putting so many games exclusively on the X-Box. If this trend continues, X-Boxes will start to simply sit on store shelves and gather dust, regardless of whether or not Microsoft is intent on keeping the project alive.
Can somebody convince me otherwise? I feel kind of bad about being so indifferent about the Bono act. Can somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
I think that one of the key points in this debate that a lot of people are missing is that the public domain is just now starting to become truly important. If you put the nearly intangible "improving civilization" aspect aside, which is very important but has little concrete, "my day-to-day life is changed because of this" effect, the public domain hasn't mattered much until now. For as long as there have been printed books, they have all cost pretty much the same amount of money in the same time period. Right now, William Shakespeare's Macbeth and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park cost the same amount of money because they're essentially the same thing: printed text on book paper that has no reason to be sold at a premium (unlike recently released books). The public domain doesn't matter, because regardless of whether the book that you choose to read or the book that a child is assigned in school is in the public domain or not, it costs the same amount of money.
This system is slowly, but surely, becoming an anachronism. It definitely hasn't become a national phenomenon or anything, but right now anyone can download Macbeth or any other book in the public domain and either read it on a PC or PDA for free, print it out for a very small amount of money, or have the book printed out via a public domain printing service for even less. This could mean much, much cheaper English (as in literature, not grammar) books for schoolchildren and generally cheaper books for anyone that feels like reading older books. If copyright limits were enforced as everyone backing the Eldred case hopes they will be, it would also mean that older movies could be viewed for just the cost of a CD-R or DVD-R, instead of the much larger price of the MPAA's $20-$40 "30th/40th Anniversary Special Edition Boxed Set", if the MPAA has even bothered to rerelease it on VHS or DVD in the last twenty years or so.
Quite simply, if the public domain were expanded today, it would mean much cheaper entertainment and education for everyone in the country, in addition to the benefits of having more works perpetually preserved in new formats and the possibility of older works being adapted or reinvented in the same way that numerous plays, movies, and TV shows have with current works in the public domain.
Dammit, it's not a salary increase! It's an ADJUSTMENT FOR INFLATION and there's NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
Heh heh heh. I'm not a right winger, but Daschle really cracks me up sometimes. He actually had the balls to put that argument forward on national television the day that this was passed, and he was quite defensive about it, too.
Nah. It works out enough to give the show some closure, or maybe even another one or two story arcs, which is all that the sane fans are really asking for. No one expects a cancelled show to go on for another four or five seasons. All that most people expect is another season or just another handful of episodes, like the eight episodes that La Femme Nikita got to close out its plot.
Star Trek. Once and Again, for a time. Roswell, for an additional season on another network. Forever Knight, which was revived twice after it was cancelled after both its first and second seasons. I'm pretty sure Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, because tons of mail was sent to UPN urging them to pick it up after The WB dropped it after its fifth season. And I'm also pretty sure that the Freaks and Geeks campaign sort of worked... weren't previously unaired episodes aired after the campaign, completing the first season?
This is done every time a show is cancelled. The difference is that only the shows with a truly dedicated fanbase survive. Farscape might have that.
I've seen and read so much from so many fans of this show all over the net, that I keep asking myself - if they have this large and loyal a following, why was this show canceled? What were the ratings like? What was Sci-Fi's reasoning?
Simple economics. The show was expensive to produce, so it needed a large audience in order to justify its existence. Its audience began to decrease, so it started bleeding huge amounts of money every week, and with a budget that high, it probably wouldn't have taken very long for the show to hit the point where it would have to do extremely well on a consistent basis for one or two full seasons just to become profitable again.
But even though that's their reason for doing it, it's still a very stupid reason. As Matt Roush from TV Guide pointed out, Farscape was the only thing that ever got the Sci-Fi Channel any national exposure in the entire history of the channel, and it got it quite a bit of national exposure too. Farscape was the only reason that the Sci-Fi Channel was ever mentioned in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and all of the other national entertainment magazines, and it also got them exposure for their other shows because they from "the channel that brought us Farscape".
It's just a simple, familiar matter of someone basing a decision on nothing but raw statistics and not thinking about all of the other elements involved.
That does not answer why one gaming platform would be region free and another from the same company would have region lockouts. It explains the reasoning for region lockouts in the first place, but not the reasoning for the inconsistency.
Since GBA games aren't region-coded and Gamecubes are region-specific, I wonder if this item would limit the region you could play your GBA games in?
You need to put a GameCube disc into the GameCube to play the games, so it appears that the Japanese Gameboy Player will only work with the Japanese GameCube and the US or European Gameboy Players will only work with US or European Gamecubes (respectively), but once you have a GameCube and Gameboy Player of the same region together, you can play a GBA game from any region.
Why didn't they just make both the GBA AND the GameCube region free?
It really aggravates me when people complain that they can't download 50 gigs of data in 10 seconds on a USD$39.99 Internet connection. It's like the people in my office that complain about rush hour traffic every morning yet refuse to take the toll roads that are often less congested. Pony up some cash if you want the luxury of faster access!
Those people are, of course, ridiculous, but that's not the same complaint that the people here have. The complaint that everyone has here is analogous to the state actually removing the lanes on the free road in an effort to force everyone onto the toll roads. They're not asking for more, they're just asking to keep what they signed up for when they had their cable modem service installed.
A Japanese culture geek put together a set of tools that have nothing to do with one another in one package and figured that it's sort of like a keiretsu, since those companies usually produce varied products that have nothing to do with one another, like jet skis and keyboards.
I'm not quite sure yet what poking around there gets them other than network topology info, but I kinda get the feeling that if there is something destructive that can be done, we're gonna get blindsided with it.
The guy that came up with this released it so that we can all see it, use it, understand it, and adapt to the problems that come with it. That's not "getting blindsided". Getting blindsided is the guy that came up with it realizing that incredible destructive power may be in his hands and that he could just use it right then and there when no one even understands what he's doing on a very basic level.
Since this is just a rearranging of what was already in TCP/IP, it was already there, sitting in some deep corner of the internet and the logic of how it works. Rather than being afraid of what it could do, I'm just thankful that the guy that found it decided to let everyone know about it so that we can take advantage of its good parts and protect ourselves against its bad parts.
Why don't we put two copies of the same human to talk to each other, to see if that human is really intelligent?
Considering that the human and his identical copy would probably spend at least twenty minutes doubting that it's possible to copy a human being and angrily debating about which identical person is "the real one", A.L.I.C.E. might not be that stupid after all.
Is a little DVD really that much more wasteful than the cans, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and plastic bags that our food from the grocery store comes in?
Deprive yourself of some Cheetos or cookies every time you rent a DVD and I think you're more than even.
Someone else suggested that they might have felt the recent (last six months or so) salvo of gaming industry lawsuits/cease & desist orders that's come after Mame.dk, Zophar.net, Lik-Sang, and many less known chip manufacturers and backup providers turning their way and wanted to GPL MAME to keep the project alive if that should happen. This sort of makes sense, since even though the source for MAME is already available to the public, the current license doesn't contain the same spirit of "Continue this project NO MATTER WHAT! It's what its creators want you to do!" that the GPL does. It's possible, but sort of unlikely.
A second possibility is that they just decided to stop pretending that their fully legal project is some sort of illicit speakeasy operation. The MAME developers and the proponents of MAME have always tried to stay under the radar and away from any possible lawsuits from the gaming industry, but that's getting sort of stupid as MAME has pretty much become a household name among gamers and tech geeks and has been referred to repeatedly in national (US) gaming magazines.
The last possibility is that they simply took more of a liking to free software than they did in the past. Maybe they went from Lapsed Catholics to Born Agains, y'know?
As everyone else has said, it is not true that Comcast's cable modem service is incompatible with Linux. I just figured I'd point out where the confusion lies.
Comcast tells people that their service is not compatible with Linux because their browser branding/half-assed customer service software is only for Windows. Because they do not currently have the capability to turn your Linux PC into an animated Comcast advertisement, they claim that no part of their service is compatible with Linux.
Gee, I'm so glad that this company just got bigger.
The previous discussion on RedSheriff on slashdot was extremely confusing as well as mostly off-topic. The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site. Very disappointing and surprising. I suggest e-mailing them to let them know what you think.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't trust technical "facts" from people that don't know the difference between downloading and uploading. That's like hiring a plumber that asks you what room the bathroom sink is in.
Re:Legality of Emulating ROMs you own under copyri
on
MAME To Become GPL?
·
· Score: 2
Nintendo claims that all emulators and ROMs are illegal and sends cease and desist letters to sites like CrackerJap just for mentioning Pokémon in their meta tags. Their statements about the laws of various countries are self-serving bullshit, not the word of a lawyer or a judge.
Also, I could be wrong, but I do not remember any court case that has tested the legality of the "licenses" in console video game manuals. Hell, EULAs haven't even been thoroughly tested in court yet!
Re:Why was it not under the GPL to begin with?
on
MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Was there any reason why it was started with the other license scheme? Are there any unique reasons why it should not be GPL'd?
The reason that it started with the different licensing scheme was basically control. The MAME developers wanted to have as much control of the program as possible while still staying open source. This way, they could make decisions for the majority of the MAME programs out there, such as not letting gambling games or new games for old hardware (specifically new Neo-Geo games) appear in the program, as well as keeping MAME from appearing in a commercial product and thus increasing its profile in the gaming industry.
Basically, they wanted to keep MAME as low profile as possible by keeping it out of commercial products and under the radar of companies whose games they emulate, such as SNK/Playmore or Capcom. Why they're considering GPLing it now when none of those issues have been resolved is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
Dohhh ? Isn't that like claiming that Floppies are obsolete since no software is delivered on floppies any more ??
Actually, floppies pretty much are obsolete, not only because no new software comes on floppies, but also because it's so incredibly easy to move data from your floppies to a much more reliable CD.
Then again, this also illustrates why floppy drives are being taken out of new PCs, but serial ports, PS/2 ports, and parallel ports aren't. Mediums for holding data can have their files easily transferred over to new mediums, but printers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, and other old hardware are not so easily, nor cheaply replaced. And besides, moving from a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to a USB keyboard and mouse gives you no additional performance, whereas moving from floppies to CD-Rs is a huge leap in performance and usefulness.
Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The /. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.
Would it be fair to redistribute songs which we downloaded for 99 cents to millions of people using Kazaa?
"Fair" doesn't really enter into the equation. The relationship between businesses and consumers works in pretty much the same way that any deal between two businesses does. We both work solely for our own interests and try to get as much as we can, and a good compromise is naturally created from that. Right now, we're getting a sweet deal from piracy and telling the RIAA "Make us an offer", and all they're coming back with is "We'll give you 50% less than the other guy!". Well, that just isn't good enough. They have to either make us a better offer or step aside while we either stick with piracy or find companies that can offer us something worthwhile.
They're not thinking of this in terms of how they can be fair to the consumer, so we shouldn't be thinking of this in terms of how we can be fair to the RIAA. They work for their agenda, we work for ours. I know it sounds mean-spirited, but it's just the rules of the game. It's the way that businesses and consumers have always worked with each other, especially since the industrial revolution.
All DRM schemes are horribly misguided because they make it difficult/unpleasant to be honest, because they are easily circumvented, and because only a few people need to circumvent them for the whole world to benefit.
Exactly. There's a new rule of business that came with the internet that a lot of businesses haven't figured out yet: If the pirate version of something is substantially better than the version that you buy in the store, anyone with the means to get the pirate version will choose it. It applies to music, to movies, to games... just about any form of entertainment. Many (most?) people don't mind paying $15-$40 (depending on the product) for their entertainment, but when they're forced to choose between a $15-$40 product and a free version of the same product that has more features and less hassle, they start to think differently.
Here's the article, no registration, no fake registration, nothing.
90% of the NYT stories that Slashdot posts can be viewed without registration through a deal that the New York Times has with Asahi.com. You can see the listing of stories here.
Not so much, it's the perverbial Gillete syndrome. Ms sells the Xbox cheaper than it costs to produce in the plan that owners will buy the highly profitable games.
That's one major factor in their business model. One of the other major factors is that if they don't have a large installed user base, no one will make games for them and the system will die a slow death. Right now, the lack of a large installed user base is forcing Konami to stop selling X-Box games in Japan and Sega to stop putting so many games exclusively on the X-Box. If this trend continues, X-Boxes will start to simply sit on store shelves and gather dust, regardless of whether or not Microsoft is intent on keeping the project alive.
Can somebody convince me otherwise? I feel kind of bad about being so indifferent about the Bono act. Can somebody give me an example of a situation in which a work's not being copyrighted-- that is, being in the public domain-- led to some kind of wonderful thing happening?
I think that one of the key points in this debate that a lot of people are missing is that the public domain is just now starting to become truly important. If you put the nearly intangible "improving civilization" aspect aside, which is very important but has little concrete, "my day-to-day life is changed because of this" effect, the public domain hasn't mattered much until now. For as long as there have been printed books, they have all cost pretty much the same amount of money in the same time period. Right now, William Shakespeare's Macbeth and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park cost the same amount of money because they're essentially the same thing: printed text on book paper that has no reason to be sold at a premium (unlike recently released books). The public domain doesn't matter, because regardless of whether the book that you choose to read or the book that a child is assigned in school is in the public domain or not, it costs the same amount of money.
This system is slowly, but surely, becoming an anachronism. It definitely hasn't become a national phenomenon or anything, but right now anyone can download Macbeth or any other book in the public domain and either read it on a PC or PDA for free, print it out for a very small amount of money, or have the book printed out via a public domain printing service for even less. This could mean much, much cheaper English (as in literature, not grammar) books for schoolchildren and generally cheaper books for anyone that feels like reading older books. If copyright limits were enforced as everyone backing the Eldred case hopes they will be, it would also mean that older movies could be viewed for just the cost of a CD-R or DVD-R, instead of the much larger price of the MPAA's $20-$40 "30th/40th Anniversary Special Edition Boxed Set", if the MPAA has even bothered to rerelease it on VHS or DVD in the last twenty years or so.
Quite simply, if the public domain were expanded today, it would mean much cheaper entertainment and education for everyone in the country, in addition to the benefits of having more works perpetually preserved in new formats and the possibility of older works being adapted or reinvented in the same way that numerous plays, movies, and TV shows have with current works in the public domain.
Dammit, it's not a salary increase! It's an ADJUSTMENT FOR INFLATION and there's NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
Heh heh heh. I'm not a right winger, but Daschle really cracks me up sometimes. He actually had the balls to put that argument forward on national television the day that this was passed, and he was quite defensive about it, too.
Nah. It works out enough to give the show some closure, or maybe even another one or two story arcs, which is all that the sane fans are really asking for. No one expects a cancelled show to go on for another four or five seasons. All that most people expect is another season or just another handful of episodes, like the eight episodes that La Femme Nikita got to close out its plot.
Star Trek. Once and Again, for a time. Roswell, for an additional season on another network. Forever Knight, which was revived twice after it was cancelled after both its first and second seasons. I'm pretty sure Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, because tons of mail was sent to UPN urging them to pick it up after The WB dropped it after its fifth season. And I'm also pretty sure that the Freaks and Geeks campaign sort of worked... weren't previously unaired episodes aired after the campaign, completing the first season?
This is done every time a show is cancelled. The difference is that only the shows with a truly dedicated fanbase survive. Farscape might have that.
I've seen and read so much from so many fans of this show all over the net, that I keep asking myself - if they have this large and loyal a following, why was this show canceled? What were the ratings like? What was Sci-Fi's reasoning?
Simple economics. The show was expensive to produce, so it needed a large audience in order to justify its existence. Its audience began to decrease, so it started bleeding huge amounts of money every week, and with a budget that high, it probably wouldn't have taken very long for the show to hit the point where it would have to do extremely well on a consistent basis for one or two full seasons just to become profitable again.
But even though that's their reason for doing it, it's still a very stupid reason. As Matt Roush from TV Guide pointed out, Farscape was the only thing that ever got the Sci-Fi Channel any national exposure in the entire history of the channel, and it got it quite a bit of national exposure too. Farscape was the only reason that the Sci-Fi Channel was ever mentioned in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and all of the other national entertainment magazines, and it also got them exposure for their other shows because they from "the channel that brought us Farscape".
It's just a simple, familiar matter of someone basing a decision on nothing but raw statistics and not thinking about all of the other elements involved.
That does not answer why one gaming platform would be region free and another from the same company would have region lockouts. It explains the reasoning for region lockouts in the first place, but not the reasoning for the inconsistency.
Since GBA games aren't region-coded and Gamecubes are region-specific, I wonder if this item would limit the region you could play your GBA games in?
You need to put a GameCube disc into the GameCube to play the games, so it appears that the Japanese Gameboy Player will only work with the Japanese GameCube and the US or European Gameboy Players will only work with US or European Gamecubes (respectively), but once you have a GameCube and Gameboy Player of the same region together, you can play a GBA game from any region.
Why didn't they just make both the GBA AND the GameCube region free?
It really aggravates me when people complain that they can't download 50 gigs of data in 10 seconds on a USD$39.99 Internet connection. It's like the people in my office that complain about rush hour traffic every morning yet refuse to take the toll roads that are often less congested. Pony up some cash if you want the luxury of faster access!
Those people are, of course, ridiculous, but that's not the same complaint that the people here have. The complaint that everyone has here is analogous to the state actually removing the lanes on the free road in an effort to force everyone onto the toll roads. They're not asking for more, they're just asking to keep what they signed up for when they had their cable modem service installed.
I'm afraid not. E-Mail allows me to send a message, or respond when I want to. Much better flexibility than IM.
ICQ has been doing that for about three years now. At least.
A Japanese culture geek put together a set of tools that have nothing to do with one another in one package and figured that it's sort of like a keiretsu, since those companies usually produce varied products that have nothing to do with one another, like jet skis and keyboards.
I'm not quite sure yet what poking around there gets them other than network topology info, but I kinda get the feeling that if there is something destructive that can be done, we're gonna get blindsided with it.
The guy that came up with this released it so that we can all see it, use it, understand it, and adapt to the problems that come with it. That's not "getting blindsided". Getting blindsided is the guy that came up with it realizing that incredible destructive power may be in his hands and that he could just use it right then and there when no one even understands what he's doing on a very basic level.
Since this is just a rearranging of what was already in TCP/IP, it was already there, sitting in some deep corner of the internet and the logic of how it works. Rather than being afraid of what it could do, I'm just thankful that the guy that found it decided to let everyone know about it so that we can take advantage of its good parts and protect ourselves against its bad parts.
Why don't we put two copies of the same human to talk to each other, to see if that human is really intelligent?
Considering that the human and his identical copy would probably spend at least twenty minutes doubting that it's possible to copy a human being and angrily debating about which identical person is "the real one", A.L.I.C.E. might not be that stupid after all.
Is a little DVD really that much more wasteful than the cans, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and plastic bags that our food from the grocery store comes in?
Deprive yourself of some Cheetos or cookies every time you rent a DVD and I think you're more than even.
Someone else suggested that they might have felt the recent (last six months or so) salvo of gaming industry lawsuits/cease & desist orders that's come after Mame.dk, Zophar.net, Lik-Sang, and many less known chip manufacturers and backup providers turning their way and wanted to GPL MAME to keep the project alive if that should happen. This sort of makes sense, since even though the source for MAME is already available to the public, the current license doesn't contain the same spirit of "Continue this project NO MATTER WHAT! It's what its creators want you to do!" that the GPL does. It's possible, but sort of unlikely.
A second possibility is that they just decided to stop pretending that their fully legal project is some sort of illicit speakeasy operation. The MAME developers and the proponents of MAME have always tried to stay under the radar and away from any possible lawsuits from the gaming industry, but that's getting sort of stupid as MAME has pretty much become a household name among gamers and tech geeks and has been referred to repeatedly in national (US) gaming magazines.
The last possibility is that they simply took more of a liking to free software than they did in the past. Maybe they went from Lapsed Catholics to Born Agains, y'know?
As everyone else has said, it is not true that Comcast's cable modem service is incompatible with Linux. I just figured I'd point out where the confusion lies.
Comcast tells people that their service is not compatible with Linux because their browser branding/half-assed customer service software is only for Windows. Because they do not currently have the capability to turn your Linux PC into an animated Comcast advertisement, they claim that no part of their service is compatible with Linux.
Gee, I'm so glad that this company just got bigger.
The previous discussion on RedSheriff on slashdot was extremely confusing as well as mostly off-topic. The fact is, the BBC is downloading spyware to your machine when you surf their site. Very disappointing and surprising. I suggest e-mailing them to let them know what you think.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't trust technical "facts" from people that don't know the difference between downloading and uploading. That's like hiring a plumber that asks you what room the bathroom sink is in.
Nintendo claims that all emulators and ROMs are illegal and sends cease and desist letters to sites like CrackerJap just for mentioning Pokémon in their meta tags. Their statements about the laws of various countries are self-serving bullshit, not the word of a lawyer or a judge.
Also, I could be wrong, but I do not remember any court case that has tested the legality of the "licenses" in console video game manuals. Hell, EULAs haven't even been thoroughly tested in court yet!
Was there any reason why it was started with the other license scheme? Are there any unique reasons why it should not be GPL'd?
The reason that it started with the different licensing scheme was basically control. The MAME developers wanted to have as much control of the program as possible while still staying open source. This way, they could make decisions for the majority of the MAME programs out there, such as not letting gambling games or new games for old hardware (specifically new Neo-Geo games) appear in the program, as well as keeping MAME from appearing in a commercial product and thus increasing its profile in the gaming industry.
Basically, they wanted to keep MAME as low profile as possible by keeping it out of commercial products and under the radar of companies whose games they emulate, such as SNK/Playmore or Capcom. Why they're considering GPLing it now when none of those issues have been resolved is beyond me.
I can remember the last time I wanted to cross water and there were cars lined up bumper-to-bumper going half a mile an hour on the bridge.