> If it is I'm not sure how I feel > about the change. Mind you the think the arcade piracy scene in terms of commercial > use is kind of dead, but it's the principal of the thing more than anything else.
The dirty secret of MAME licensing has always been that MAMEdev can't afford to sue anybody, so in reality the effective license was always BSD-3-Clause.
Other factors, in no particular order:
- MAME's license has prevented us from doing any commercial emulations, so we get to sit around and watch the likes of DotEmu stick end users (ourselves included) with crap. - MAME's license has been problematic for museums and libraries that charge admission but aren't actually for-profit. - In 2005, it was reasonable for MAMEdev to want additional protection from Sega/Konami/Capcom/Taito. In 2015, Smit is going to be holding a DU fundraiser to buy the shambling corpses of those companies as they become available.