Let's say that I own a very old computer (such as the Commodore 64, for instance) and that I want to implement a free BIOS for it, to replace its original non-free boot-ROM code.
I can develop my new free BIOS code, compile it, generating as a result a ROM image file, burn it into an UV-erasable EPROM chip, plug it into the original PCB of the real machine and validate whether my implementation works or not. It will almost certainly not work in the first attempt. Then I can remove the chip, place it in a 10-minute ultra-violet light "bath" for erasing its contents before burning into it a modified version of my BIOS code under development. And this cycle is typicaly repetitive, time-consuming, tedious and cumbersome. Or I could get MAME and load it with the ROM image of my experimental BIOS code and check whether it works or not on the emulated environment. For that usage scenario there's no need to download and use the original non-free ROMs. This shows that MAME as an emulation environment free software project, can have much more legitimate uses than simply "playing thousands of (mostly non-free) games for free". On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 2:14 PM, Jason Self <ja...@bluehome.net> wrote: > J.B. Nicholson <j...@forestfield.org> wrote .. >> Julian Marchant wrote: >> > As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre. >> >> How do you figure this? > > I think they are referring to the ActionScript code [0] to construct the > player (or whatever else.) It is usually not free which means that you're > still running non-free software in the end, even if you're using a free > software player like Gnash to interpret it and just "watching the video." > It seems to be a similar problem to the JavaScript Trap [1]. > > [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript > [1] https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html