> Bah, this is not about sharing code with other emulators, it hasn't been a problem > during all these years so why should it suddenly be a problem now?
It has been a problem for years (I advocated GPL when this most recent license was adopted to avoid exactly these issues). It's more important lately because MAME is largely a completed legacy project and most of the developers are now focusing on MESS where high-quality open source code is thick on the ground.
> What magic code is it that Mame needs but can't have due to licencing problems? It's > bullshit.
One concrete example: back when our ST-V/Saturn support was useless I politely asked Yabause to allow us to use their code. They declined because they felt the GPL protected them better than the current MAME license, and so Kale and I ended up reinventing tens of thousands of lines of code, much of which is still buggy today. We could've put that effort towards supporting more games or other more useful things, but we weren't able to.