Mark H Weaver writes:
Hi,
I haven't yet looked closely at MAME, but for now I wanted to address
the question of WINE.
Jean Louis <address@hidden> writes:
Put yourself in the view point of free software user. What such user
is
going to do with WINE?
WINE has at least one useful purpose for a free software developer:
to
help them develop and test Windows ports of their software compiled
with
MingW.
For example, it is important for GNU Guile to run on Windows because
programs that already depend on Guile (e.g. GNU Lilypond), and
programs
that we hope will use Guile in the future (e.g. GNU Emacs) include
ports
for Windows. The Windows ports of both of the aforementioned
programs
are useful for introducing the free software movement to Windows
users.
I would also note that WINE is included in both Trisquel and
Parabola.
* * * * *
MAME is a different case. FWIW, here's a Parabola ticket on the
question of MAME:
https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/961
I'd like to know if there are any free programs that can be run under
MAME and cannot be run natively on GNU/Linux. Can anyone answer this
question?
Thanks,
Mark
I'm the one who gave the Wine example with a friend running old
versions
of Blender. You could say "oh well that's unusual", but I think this
is
a really bad direction.
For one thing, free software based emulators are a great entry point
into people exploring the guts of how machines work.
Many of these ROMs may be nonfree. But I really think it's a mistake
to
prejudge and *prevent* interesting research work by refusing to
include
something that is from its point all the way down free software.
Emulation tools are also a great motivation for research on exactly
some
of the hardest problems free software is facing right now, such as
free
hardware designs. By condemning this space we may reduce our chance
for
serious advancements. Please don't do this!
Sometimes having these systems available does eventually lead to
interesting software being released as free software. For example,
the
SCUMMVM machine was originally used to play proprietary old point and
click adventure games. But *because* it was released, we saw one game
enthusiastically released as free software, Beneath A Steel Sky, and
this might never have happened otherwise.
Similarly, the z-machine has some free software games. I am told that
this one is GPLv2+: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=52x2zxt8ers4rxc0
Some more: http://ifdb.tads.org/search?searchfor=tag:GPL
A friend of mine is a free software developer who is greatly
interested
in building text adventure systems on the z-machine with free software
stacks from top to bottom. Would it make sense to demonize this work,
and prevent that from ever happening, because at present there are so
few options presently?
I think this is a really bad path to go down. I hope we don't go down
it. Let's condemn proprietary software, but not make assumptions that
free software systems will only be used for proprietary purposes. We
might make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and prevent some
future
interesting free work. I think that would be a shame.