Re: MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[rain1]

On 2016-03-29 09:25, Jookia wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 09:30:40AM +0200, Jean Louis wrote:
> > I cannot understand the rationalization and justifications based on 
> > the
> > single fact how WINE/MAME or other similar emulators are free software
> > by themselves, and that is the only reason to include them, but let us
> > avoid all the reality about that, that those platforms are being
> > developed for the major purpose of running non-free software. It does
> > not play alone. It is hypocrisy.
>
> I think this might be my last email since they don't seem to be forming 
> any kind
> of discussion, so I'll leave this question: Should we ship Linux-libre 
> with
> virtualization support? From what I know there's only a handful of 
> systems out
> there that can run it without proprietary blobs in its BIOS updates. 
> What about
> virtualization with PCI passthrough support, primarily used for video 
> games?
>
> > Jean Louis
>
> Jookia.

I guess I should say a couple things since this all came about when I 
mentioned I packaged MAME 
<https://notabug.org/rain1/pkgs/src/master/rain/mame.scm> for guix, 
since it recently switched to GPL2.

My opinion on this is pretty simple: MAME is free software.

I don't mind if it goes into guix packages tree or not - to be honest it 
doesn't seem that great an idea. The compile time is huge and the output 
is a 160MB binary. That would use up resources from build farms that 
could be better spent on core libraries like libc, gcrypt, openssl, ...

MAME, Wine, Qemu and GNU/linux-libre all have the following in common: 
You can use them to run non free software. While they can all also be 
used to run free software I don't think this is important. Here's why: 
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).