> Well it's certainly true that they couldn't sue anybody BUT the fear of doing > something illegal keeps 90% of the would-be bootleggers at bay. Now that this is > gone, I'm not sure what the consequences are going to be.
No way, look at all the MAME-based X-in-1 systems, and the number of places they show up at.
> That's the thing I'm concerned about right there, joking aside. With a free, > ready-made emulator made available what is stopping someone from, say, buying the > rights to all the konami games and essentially selling mame as the "Konami > collection" Mind you that might not be a bad thing considering the current state of > "official" releases by companies, I just wonder about legal ramifications.
And what's wrong with that? Allowing commercial use means the rights holders can take advantage of MAME to keep the games available in a legitimate form. MAME isn't supposed to be the enemy of the arcade developers/publishers
> The other thing I worry about is now that you can sell mame, people might not > contribute source code to the main build and will make a custom build of mame and > sell it.
Well the bootleggers don't contribute back to MAME anyway (not that you'd want their contributions), so it's not like it makes a difference IRL. But with significant parts of the code under GPL2+ the whole MAME binary falls under GPL anyway, so if they want to play by the rules they need to distribute their modified source to anyone receiving a copy of the compiled binary.