On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 22:54:31 -0400 Richard wrote: > Is this kind of issue really limited to emulators? There are other > kinds of programs which are platforms to run other programs, and I > think that they would all raise similar issues -- though perhaps there > is an empirical tendency for emulators to be used for running nonfree > programs.
in the broadest sense, it is somewhat ubiquitous - any application, which its only purpose is as a host of other "foreign" applications would qualify - in addition to the obvious emulators and game engines, hugely popular VM "platforms" such as java, python, also audio plugin hosts, and let's not forget web browsers, would also meet that description for emulators (the questionable ones) it is not precisely a "tendency" to be used primarily to run non-free programs - in most cases, that was the original motivation for writing them - nintendo emulators for example, are probably the most prolific and popular; but no one writes new games for them - they are popular for the nostagia value of playing the old games often though, the motivation was only for the author to practice the art of emulator/compiler design - ie: the original author never intended to _use_ it for anything another aspect of those, is that often the emulator itself is not entirely reverse-engineered, but will include the original manufacturer's operating system ROM, or require that the user acquires one, in order to do anything with it - most MAME emulators are of that sort - they do not distribute the ROMs for copyright reasons; but the emulator is useless without them, other than educationally (to study emulator/compiler design)