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

[alírio eyng]

these are the approaches i can think:
*extremely conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
 removing all emulators
*conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
 make packages/executables like game1-emulator1, game1-emulator2, ...
and not allowing direct emulator installation/execution
*liberal (avoiding false positive errors[1] and false negative errors[2])
 allowing all emulators with free games know
*extremely liberal (eliminating false negative errors)[2]
 allowing all emulators

extremely liberal is naive because it just looks down in the
dependency dag, there's no reason to not look up
extremely conservative is naive because it doesn't allow completely free uses
conservative would solve the issues that originate this thread
liberal is more convenient in some cases

i consider conservative better, liberal ok, and any of the extremes unreasonable

fsdg doesn't allow extremely liberal (according to other people
interpretation), in ndiswrapper, for example:
"with one exception, all ndis drivers are nonfree--and the one free
one is a windows port of a native linux driver. so right now, this
isn't useful for anything besides using nonfree software"[3]

parabola follows extremely conservative with your-freedom_emu[4]

assuming we choose conservative; for wine, we can make guile-wine,
emacs-wine[5] and gnutls-wine[6], but remove wine

it seems there's at least one free game needing an emulator[7]

i think this is a discussion about fsdg[8] and we should discuss it at
address@hidden

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_positive_error
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_negative_error
[3]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines
[4]https://www.parabola.nu/packages/libre/any/your-freedom_emu/
[5]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01216.html
[6]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-11/msg00333.html
[7]http://pineight.com/lu/
[8]http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html