Copyright File for MESS added

[Jordi Mallach]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 01:59:34PM +0200, Emmanuel Kasper wrote:
> I pushed today a copyright file for mess.

This rocks! Thanks for the hard work!

I've had a quick look and it'd seem we're ready to go, but given we have
new and modified orig.tar.gz and 0.143 might be days away, I suggest we
wait for the new version before an upload. What do you think?

> I used the following technique to list copyright owners:

OH. MY. GOD.

> Having a non commercial clause protects you actually from making money
> from the emulator, and it is wise. I have seen that as soon a someone is
> trying to make money with an emulator, People sue. Look what happened
> when the Hercules Emulator author started to grow a commercial support:
> IBM sued them.

Well, I think it made sense when all those people were selling ROM+MAME
CDs for profit. But the internet is omnipresent today and it's very easy
to get both using P2P. I don't think the licence is blocking anyone from
making money from MAME if they want.

I'd love if this was plain GPL, just like ScummVM.

IBM should have sued those offering commercial support, I guess. But suing
the little guys is always easier.

> Besides that having DEP-5 allows anyone to find the DFSG free bits in
> Mame. All the work of the former Mmae coordinateor Aaron Gilles is
> placed under the permissive BSD license, which allows heavy code reuse.
> A DEP 5 copyright file allows a quick tracking of that code.

This is true. This file is most probably the most exhaustive study on MAME
copyright status ever. :)

Thanks for the hard grunt work, Manu.

-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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