Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Felipe Sanches]

Also, for some additional insight on the topic, here's my talk about MAME
at LibrePlanet 2016:

http://mamedev.emulab.it/fsanches/2016/04/07/hardware-reverse-engineering-insights-from-the-mame-project/

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 7:22 PM, Luke  wrote:

> FYI, the Parabola community has a breakdown of Emulators and their
> ability to run Free Software on their wiki:
> https://wiki.parabola.nu/Emulator_licensing_issues
>
> This may prove useful in the event of further research/discussion.
>
>
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Luke]

FYI, the Parabola community has a breakdown of Emulators and their
ability to run Free Software on their wiki:
https://wiki.parabola.nu/Emulator_licensing_issues

This may prove useful in the event of further research/discussion.




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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 22:23:17 +
alírio eyng  wrote:

> Felipe Sanches:
> >MAME provides an interactive debugger  
> so mame is not just an emulator.
> it is a emulator, disassembler and debugger.
> this is relevant information i can't see in official documentation,
> thanks.
> 
[...]
> a interesting development environment is useful in itself and don't
> need free games.
> is there a similar environment to a current architecture?
community/qtspim 9.1.17-2
New user interface for spim, a MIPS simulator.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

On 4/5/16, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli  wrote:
>documentation (and packaging as you point it) can
> steer users towards free software.
...
> Which one to do would then depend on the context.
> For instance with qemu and libvirt, the software was modified not to
> steer users towards running non-free GNU/Linux distributions.
qemu images seems big to package.
in guix we can make non-substitutable packages.

> While unrelated, the case of debootstrap is also interesting
not unrelated at all.
the guix way for qemu images would be packaging trisquel from
debootstrap, parabola from pacstrap, ...

>> hiding the emulator executable/package
> I don't understand what it means.
it is an opt-out whitelist implementation, i sketched it at [1].
in guix we can make a package not directly installable, but use it as
a dependency for other packages; so it would go to the store but not
to the profile and remain out of $PATH.
in parabola we can make the executable install to
/usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier and remain out of $PATH, but it would
need to copy the executable to every game package or make a pacman
wrapper to make it not directly installable.

>> would warn when they are exiting the free distro frontier and poke
>> them to add free games to the distro (suggesting to developers or
>> sending patches)
> That is very similar to documentation for me.
i think skipping the documentation and using a general-purpose search
engine like duckduckgo is quite common.
making the user install some other packaged free software and execute
a command like "PATH=$PATH:/usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier/wine/" could
warn much better.

>> alternatively, forking all emulators and creating a
>> free community around them would also provide a freedom frontier
> That is nice too. Uzebox seem in the right direction with that.
not sure[2]

looking up in dag, there's three kinds of packages:
useless in freedom: ndiswrapper.
mostly useless in freedom: wine.
useful in freedom: qemu.

useless packages should be removed.
making a opt-out whitelist for mostly useless packages seems the better option.
useful packages should get a opt-in whitelist.

mame should be classified for each architecture:
i386 and z80[3] are useful as development tools replacing current hardware.
obsolete architectures are useless if only nonfree software depend on
it, mostly useless otherwise.

[1]http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2016-03/msg00021.html
[2]http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Possible_copyright_violations
[3]z80's are still produced
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Sat, 2 Apr 2016 08:48:58 +
alírio eyng  wrote:

> On 4/2/16, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli  wrote:
> > Why not just requiring some documentation along the emulator that
> > documents at least one fully free software that can run on it.  
> this is missing some complexity:
> we don't want something better done natively (we exclude
> ndiswrapper)[1] but we still want to allow introducing free software
> on nonfree platforms[2]
My point was that documentation (and packaging as you point it) can
steer users towards free software.

The goal of the software may even be altered this way, if it cannot
be used fully free with its regular uses cases.

The former case might be faster to do, but getting it right would be
difficult since the user would have to be aware of that documentation.

Which one to do would then depend on the context.
For instance with qemu and libvirt, the software was modified not to
steer users towards running non-free GNU/Linux distributions.

While unrelated, the case of debootstrap is also interesting, since, on
parabola, it by default debootstraps free software distributions.
References and configuration related to non-100%-free distributions
were removed.

> i think packaging is better than documenting, shouldn't be much more
> effort
Right, I assumed documenting was way faster. I was probably wrong.

> but this doesn't address the problem of discernment
> example: i can go to [3] and see there are four games, i know they are
> free because they are inside a free distro frontier
> if users need to exit the free distro frontier, they probably will
> find nonfree and free games and don't see much difference
> the ideal would be to have a comprehensive set of games packaged
> inside the free distro frontier
The documentation would have had to take that into account.
I was thinking of something along the lines of HOWTO that you find in
the documentation of the distributions. Such as list of commands that
would explain how to do it, while making sure that freedom is preserved.

But as you pointed out, packaging might be faster and easier.

> hiding the emulator executable/package
I don't understand what it means.

> would warn when they are exiting the free distro frontier and poke
> them to add free games to the distro (suggesting to developers or
> sending patches)
That is very similar to documentation for me.
We might also want to do that on the parabola wiki, trying to implicate
people who might want to use such emulators.
Example: Why is  not in Parabola
 |-> 

> alternatively, forking all emulators and creating a
> free community around them would also provide a freedom frontier
That is nice too. Uzebox seem in the right direction with that.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Joshua Gay]

On 04/04/2016 06:20 PM, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
> Joshua Gay from the FSF posted
> https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2016-03/msg00039.html
> which said that a renamed MAME fork should be fine to distribute (to
> avoid an unrelated trademark issue with MAME) and suggested not linking
> to the MAME site to avoid nonfree software inducement.

To be clear, I never said that a renamed MAME fork should be fine to
distribute. I did issue warnings and consideratons for those considering
packaging and distributing MAME, which included forking the project. If
a person does go ahead and package a custom version of MAME, whether or
not that package can be included in a free distro and still conform to
the free distro guidelines remains to be seen.

My email was not a conclusion or some final word on the matter and it
should not be treated as such. My email was a contribution to an ongoing
conversation about this topic.

-- 
Joshua Gay
Licensing & Compliance Manager  
Free Software Foundation
GPG key ID: 8DA625BBWhat's a GPG key ID?
See our Email Self-Defense Guide:

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

Felipe Sanches:
>On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:23 PM, alírio eyng  wrote:
>> this development environment works for all architectures mame supports?
>Yes. The debugger dialog is generic
...
>mame/src/devices/cpu$ ls
...
>i386
the debugger works on all architectures
i can use i386
i can use z80 and read your code as example
it still seem useless supporting obselete architectures with only
nonfree software depending on it

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Felipe Sanches]

The other situation when I was able to benefit from the automatically
generated custom debugger UI was when working on emulating the
(non-free) game Another World from the 90's. It was originally
executed on Amiga computers, so the debugger would let me see the
opcodes of the Amiga CPU. But the game was actually originally
implemented in a custom virtual machine created by its author, Eric
Chahi. I decided to emulate this virtual machine in MAME as if it were
a real CPU. The end-result was that I got for the first time the
ability to inspect the game (non-free) bytecode at the virtual-machine
level by running it on the automatically generated debugger that MAME
provides.

This opens up a new level of insight on the internal workings of the
program that was never possible before with so much ease. A screenshot
of that can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/juca_gnu/status/686597622417719296

Happy Hacking,
Felipe Sanches

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:47 PM, Felipe Sanches  wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:23 PM, alírio eyng  wrote:
>> Felipe Sanches:
>>>MAME provides an interactive debugger
>> so mame is not just an emulator.
>> it is a emulator, disassembler and debugger.
>> this is relevant information i can't see in official documentation, thanks.
>>
>> it seems even with a obsolete executable format, it can be a
>> interesting development environment.
>> a interesting development environment is useful in itself and don't
>> need free games.
>> is there a similar environment to a current architecture?
>> can this development environment be used in freedom to develop a game
>> from scratch?
>
> Yes. I did it.
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/tree/master/
>
>> this development environment works for all architectures mame supports?
> Yes. The debugger dialog is generic and you get it automatically as a
> bonus if you implement a new CPU emulation module. This happened with
> me a couple times already. I got access to the technical manuals of
> the first computer designed and manufactured in Brazil, which was
> called "Patinho Feio" (meaning something like "Ugly Duckling
> Computer"). I got the printed documentation from the hands of one of
> my university professors at the engineering school. He was involved in
> the team that developed the pioneer computer back in 1972.
>
> Based on the documentation (which I published it all on the Internet
> Archive with authorization form the original author:
> https://archive.org/details/Montador_do_Patinho_Feio__Julho1977) I
> wrote a new CPU emulation driver in MAME to emulate the custom
> instruction set of this Brazilian machine. Not only emulation works
> when loading its sample software - a trivially simple hello-world
> extracted from a punched data tape, trivial enough to not even be
> copyrightable I guess... - It also allows me to run the code step by
> step and to inspect the system memory because the whole debugging
> framework was "magically" inherited by the way MAME codebase is
> structured.
>
> So this makes it sure that absolutely every CPU architecture supported
> by MAME does also provide such nice interactive debugger. And the list
> of supported CPUs is absurdly broad:
>
> felipe@guarana:~/mame/src/devices/cpu$ ls
> 8x300  arm   drcbec.cppdrccache.h  e0c6200   hd61700
> i860 m6800 mcs51pdp8   sc61860  sm8500   tms32010
> ucom4x86emit.h
> adsp2100   arm7  drcbec.h  drcfe.cpp   e132xshmcs40
> i960 m68000mcs96pic16c5x   scmp spc700   tms32025
> uml.cpp  x86log.cpp
> alph8201   asap  drcbeut.cpp   drcfe.h es5510hphybrid
> ie15 m6805 melps4   pic16c62x  scoressem tms32031
> uml.hx86log.h
> alto2  avr8  drcbeut.h drcuml.cpp  esrip i386
> jaguar   m6809 minx powerpcscudsp   ssp1601  tms32051
> unsp z180
> am29000ccpu  drcbex64.cpp  drcuml.hf8i4004
> lc8670   mb86233   mips pps4   se3208   superfx  tms32082
> upd7725  z8
> amis2000   cop400drcbex64.hdrcumlsh.h  g65816i8008
> lh5801   mb86235   mn10200  psxsh2  t11  tms34010
> upd7810  z80
> apexc  cosmacdrcbex86.cpp  dsp16   h6280 i8085
> lr35902  mb88xxnec  rspsh4  tlcs90   tms57002
> v30mzz8000
> arccp1610drcbex86.hdsp32   h8i8089
> m37710   mc68hc11  patinhofeio  s2650  sharctlcs900  tms7000
> v60
> arcompact  cubeqcpu  drccache.cpp  dsp56k  hcd62121  i86
> m6502mcs48 pdp1 saturn sm510tms1000  tms9900
> v810

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Felipe Sanches]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 12:26 AM, alírio eyng  wrote:
> Felipe Sanches:
>>I will try not to talk here any more, unless I
>>have something really new to say.
> i will probably continue replying while people are quoting me and
> making proposals or confusing general-purpose runtime dependencies
> with tools for reverse engineering without understanding the
> consequences.

MAME provides an interactive debugger that enables reverse engineering
of the loaded ROMs.

http://letshackarcadegames.com/?p=338

http://letshackarcadegames.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dkong_watchpoint_barrel.png

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Felipe Sanches]

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 3:36 PM, alírio eyng  wrote:
> Tobias Platen:
>> Emulators can be useful for reverse engineering
> reverse engineering is the action of understanding undocumented
> interfaces (mostly hardware).
> emulators are the _result_ of reverse engineering, not tools to do it.
> this result is useless if there's no other interface implementations
> to develop things to or free software requiring it to run.

I completely disagree!
I have been actively using MAME to perform reverse engineering of
non-free firmware for a bit more than a couple years.
Since I do it myself, I know my sentence is true :-)

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

Tobias Platen:
> Emulators can be useful for reverse engineering
reverse engineering is the action of understanding undocumented
interfaces (mostly hardware).
emulators are the _result_ of reverse engineering, not tools to do it.
this result is useless if there's no other interface implementations
to develop things to or free software requiring it to run.

> In the case of MAME at least some files will be usable to build new works.
sure, but if they are to be used as source, this don't justify
inclusion of executables in a free distro.

> Some of those old FM-based sound synthesizer chips are emulated with MAME
sounds like obsolete api, is there any reason to use it instead of
using sound synthesizer software?

> Ndiswrapper is a different case, because it implements a proprietary 
> interface of the Windows Kernel.
"proprietary interface" is misleading.
there are _undocumented_ interfaces and maybe _legally unusable_ interfaces [1].
ndiswrapper implements an undocumented interface originally meant as
software (api).
mame implements undocumented interfaces originally meant as hardware.
the only difference is the original intentions, and i think they are
not relevant.

> sometimes I use Wine, but only when I need to reverse engineer a proprietary 
> format.
i think you meant you use nonfree software on top of wine with the
intention of reverse engineering it.
this is a compromise acceptable to use nonfree software, if "the use
of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of
that very same nonfree software" [2].
but this isn't related to wine (or other emulators) at all and apply
to _all_ nonfree software.
free distros choose the compromise of making this a little harder by
not supporting nonfree software so people are not mislead in using it.
but it is still reasonably easy to opt-out of the free distro
whitelist and use nonfree software if wanted.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
[2]https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-program.en.html

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Tobias Platen]

Emulators can be useful for reverse engineering, so there may be cases 
where their use is ok. In the case of MAME at least some files will be 
usable to build new works. Some of those old FM-based sound synthesizer 
chips are emulated with MAME, unfortunately some NSF(Nintendo Sound 
File)-players still the non-free code from mame. Because MAME is now 
free, those programs can be liberated.


Ndiswrapper is a different case, because it implements a proprietary 
interface of the Windows Kernel. I do not use Ndiswrapper because all 
hardware that I use works out of the box with Trisquel GNU/Linux, but 
sometimes I use Wine, but only when I need to reverse engineer a 
proprietary format.


On 04/03/2016 04:20 PM, alírio eyng wrote:

i think i got the root of the controversy:
some people started to think of emulators as hardware (replacements)
  hardware is useful to develop to
some people started to think of emulators as obsolete apis
  obsolete apis are not useful to develop to

i still see emulators (like ndiswrapper) as obsolete apis; without
free applications that can't run natively they are useless and should
be removed so the user doesn't run nonfree software by mistake
unless they emulate current hardware (like qemu), in this case they
are useful in themselves (don't need a free application that can't run
natively), just being hardware replacements helping development
wine is a exception to introduce free software in nonfree platforms

the compromise is define _current hardware_
"MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers"[1]
_vintage_ seems undoubtly out _current hardware_

i also noticed i was conflating technical details i shouldn't
my approach was to make an opt-out whitelist of free uses (mostly
games) for packages with a nonfree community (mostly emulators like
mame or wine) implemented with the package manager/filesystem

[1]http://mamedev.org/



--
Sent from my Libreboot X200

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

i think i got the root of the controversy:
some people started to think of emulators as hardware (replacements)
 hardware is useful to develop to
some people started to think of emulators as obsolete apis
 obsolete apis are not useful to develop to

i still see emulators (like ndiswrapper) as obsolete apis; without
free applications that can't run natively they are useless and should
be removed so the user doesn't run nonfree software by mistake
unless they emulate current hardware (like qemu), in this case they
are useful in themselves (don't need a free application that can't run
natively), just being hardware replacements helping development
wine is a exception to introduce free software in nonfree platforms

the compromise is define _current hardware_
"MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers"[1]
_vintage_ seems undoubtly out _current hardware_

i also noticed i was conflating technical details i shouldn't
my approach was to make an opt-out whitelist of free uses (mostly
games) for packages with a nonfree community (mostly emulators like
mame or wine) implemented with the package manager/filesystem

[1]http://mamedev.org/

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2016 23:55:22 +0200
Jean Louis  wrote:

> Firmware or blobs are removed from mainstream Linux kernel exactly for
> that reason that there is no source code or/and there is no free
> software license.
> 
> When I say "free" I mean by 4 software freedoms. Binary or blob or
> firmware is not free without the corresponding source code. That is
> what I meant with it: there are no "free firmware" or "free ROMs", as
> if someone says in that manner, I would assume he gives me final
> product or binary, which cannot be free software without the source
> code.

Here you are talking about the fimrwares running on the peripherals the
Linux kernel communicates with.
That includes WiFi cards, Ethernet cards, GPUs and so on.

Some WiFi chips have a microcontroller inside.
This is a CPU with many peripherals on the same chip.
This is very similar to the chip that smartphones and tablet uses, but
here they don't have external RAM chips[1].

Long time ago, such WiFi chips had their firmware stored on a
dedicated flash.

However the cost of such flash could be avoided by making the host
OS(GNU/Linux for instance) load the fimrware into the microcontroller.

Since many drivers communicate with the device fimrware to operate,
not loading the firmware would result in the impossibility to use that
device.

If we take the ath9k_htc corresponding fimrware, it's written in C.
However its only purpose is to make that WiFi chip work.

Now the Linux kernel doesn't make any difference between loading binary
code for a peripheral, other configuration data, or even register dump.
The code that manages it is the same in all cases, and only deal with
sending data to a given peripheral.

As for ROMs it designs read only memory.
A chip could be designed:
- To run code from an internal or external read only memory.
- To run code from an internal or external flash memory.
- To run code that is loaded by a host processor (Like the one you
  run GNU/Linux on).
- Not to run code at all. Some WiFi chip (like the ath5k and ath9k
  compatible ones) don't run any code. Instead the host OS (GNU/Linux
  for instance) talks directly to the hardware.

Note that many terms are abused, that makes it difficult to give proper
definitions.
This is also partly because the hardware changes too fast, and humans
have a tendency to still use the same terms when it no longer applies.

For instance if computers used to have ROMs to store the BIOS, and
at some point switches to flash, you will see many people still
referring to ROMs, even if they are long gone for that purpose.

References:
---
[1]The line between both is not that clear, since you may be able to
   use a SOC for practical purposes without external ram, or add
   external RAM to microcontrollers. The quantity of RAM is also often
   used to distinguish between both.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2016 23:55:22 +0200
Jean Louis  wrote:

> Good! So, libreboot has the corresponding source code, right?
It does.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2016 15:09:44 -0300
Felipe Sanches  wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
>  wrote:
> >> Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on
> >> nonfree software in order to run?  
> > It's the other way around.
> > As I understand it, only non-free software running on top of MAME
> > (or the hardware it emulates) exist.  
> 
> If that's your understanding, than it seems you misunderstand it.
> There have been examples of free firmware running on top of hardware
> emulated by MAME already listed earlier in this very same thread.
Yes, I've updated my understanding, after reading about free software
on MAME, later in the thread. Sorry for catching up late.

Now I do understand that there is free software that can run on top of
mame, but I don't know yet if it can build and run 100% free.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016 17:19:50 -0400
Joshua Gay  wrote:

> Yet another reason it might be useful for a purpose to run such
> systems and programs is to be able to extract or export data or
> artwork. For example, a person might have some old software and data
> files that they would like to convert to a format that works with
> free software. It might be that the only practical or feasible way to
> do this would be to run the data file in the old program and then
> convert/export the data file into a format that can then be used by
> free software programs. Or alternatively the software itself may have
> art or data files embedded in it that could be extracted by running
> it on the original system via the emulator. If the aim is to move
> data or art from the nonfree program/system to a free program, then
> that is probably a good thing.
Reverse engineering might be a better approach.
However, in that case, I'm not sure it's always going to be worth the
time spent on it.

An example of such approach:
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20110326-parsing_dos_word_files_for_gsm_map/

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016 17:13:22 +0100
ra...@openmailbox.org wrote:

> It is a little worrying to me that people are talking about excluding
> a free software program - in fact a GPL2 licensed one - on the basis
> of what it might be used for. What if people started demanding
> removal of "hacking tools" [1] like gdb and nmap even though they are
> invaluable for debugging?
The devil is in the details. I don't see why *not* shipping software
like Envy which only purpose is to install non-free GPU drivers would be
problematic.

See my other comments in the other mails about the "documentation".

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2016 16:30:17 -0600
Isaac David  wrote:

> Hi,
Hi,

> My view was that while useless in a 100% free environment just
> having them installed and inspecting their user interfaces wouldn't
> violate your freedom in any way. A free emulator with free
> dependencies wouldn't be unethical unless it recommended using
> proprietary software with it. However in the last few days I have
> seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
> imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
> without leaving your comfy libre OS.
Just requiring documentation that shows how at least one valid use case
(that works) while remaining 100% free would be great:
It would fix the issue for good, while improving users freedom by
limiting the steer towards non-free software that such virtual machines
create.

For instance:
- For qemu, libvirt and so on, we would ship or point to documentation
  explaining how to run a 100% free software distribution like Trisquel.
- For wine we would document compiling and running of a 100% free
  software.
- For emulators, unless 100% free distributions do exist for the
  machines they emulate, we'd document how to compile and run an
  application or game.
- For emulators that have no 100% free games but that have a toolchain,
  we could document how to do compile and run a hello world. That would
  count as 100% free software compiling and running.

> Meanwhile other emulators and wine are completely out of the
> question because there's free applications for them, even though
> using the non-free ones is more common.
I don't doubt that, however is it possible to compile and run such
applications 100% free? Since some GNU software is ported on wine, I
would guess that there is a way to do it, but I've no proof.
I fear that some free software applications would include some non-free
runtime libraries. Given how poorly I know non-free OS, I've no idea if
it's a legitimate concern.

> Parabola documents emulators extensively in a wiki page.
Should we document how to compile and run free software there, or
should we ship that documentation with the package?
In the former case, should we point the user to the wiki page at the
end of the package installation, in the case of Parabola.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2016 09:50:23 +0200
Jean Louis  wrote:

> This is my opinion:
> 
> - comparing Gnash to MAME is out of the context.
I think they are both virtual machines that can run other programs on
top, so it looks very similar to me.

> - the context is the time. We are looking into Gnash which started
>   development 11 years ago. The purpose of Gnash was to liberate
> people so not to use Flash. The initial purpose of Gnash was
>   liberation. Reference to time when Gnash was developed:
>   https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/manual/gnashuser.html
> - back in time GNU was searching for kernel. Until proper kernel was
>   found, it was hard for any GNU user to gain the degree of liberation
>   that is possible today, see:
> https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull4.html 
I think think that time is not a relevant criteria here, since we
still don't want to include software which steers users towards non-free
software, even if it was started long time ago with the goal of
liberating users. More below on gnash.

> - also websites and HTML changed, now everybody can watch and publish
>   videos without Flash. The purpose of Gnash has been achieved and is
>   being achieved.
Viewing videos is not the only purpose of Gnash, it is/was be used a
lot to run flash programs in standalone mode, for instance educative
games on the OLPC.

> - today we don't want to run, not even non-free Javascript, we have
>   LibreJS. it is there to complain to website owners to provide to us
>   either free software, or to decide not to run free software. 
Right, even if free software javascript do exist, I guess that remote
javascript code execution (from the website) to the computer
would run (without users knowledge) non-free javascript code.
How do we deal with that?

> - in my opinion it is quite correct to reject the inclusion of Mac Os
> on Linux, because such emulator, even free, is made to run non-free
>   software. By including it and justifying it that someone could make
>   free software on it, we speak out of the today's time context.
We should rather require documentation with each emulator, that would
tell where to compile and run 100% free software on that emulator.
Without it, the emulator would not be included.

>   Just like LibreJS was made for free software users.
> 
>   The question shall be: is this software that we want to include,
> made for free software users? MAME® is certainly not such software.
Unless someone documents how to run 100% free software with it.
That sounds a good compromise.

>   What is the purpose of this software? Does the purpose collide with
>   the purpose to liberate the users?
We can change the purpose of the software by providing documentation as
mentioned above.

>   Comparing MAME to Gnash, is comparing it out of the context. Today
> is 2016, not 2005 when Gnash was made to liberate people from
> proprietary Flash.
We're only talking about including or not software in distributions.
Time is irrelevant here since we are in 2016 now, and our decisions
only affect the present and the future.
We probably can find some flash program that can be built and run with
100% free software.

>   Today we have LibreJS, better comparison would be to compare the
>   purposes of MAME to purposes of Icecat with the built-in LibreJS. Of
>   course not everybody is using it, but Icecat is included in GuixSD
>   because of the liberation it brings to users.
The javascript issue is more tricky because it impacts users in a very
significant manner.

>   What liberation has MAME given to users over long time? It is
> binding users to use non-free ROMs.
Let's wait and see. Maybe you would have some free software running on
it one day.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 15:32:27 -0500
Matt Lee  wrote:

> The majority of video game systems that MAME can emulate have very
> little in the way of free software that can run on them, but MAME also
> includes the MESS emulator for various older home computers. These
> home computers have lots of free software available for them.
Having free software for such computers is nice, however are we able to
run 100% free software on top of MESS or the hardware it emulates?

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 16:51:34 -0300
Felipe Sanches  wrote:

> MAME emulates vintage general-purpose computers. It is pretty clear
> that people can implement free-software operating systems and programs
> for those vintage computers as well.

There are 3 free software OS that can run on the comodore64. However
that raise 2 questions:
1) Does MAME emulate hardware that can run free software OS or programs?
2) Assuming it does, can theses OS or programs be built and fully free?

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 16:31:40 +
alírio eyng  wrote:

> 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
Why not just requiring some documentation along the emulator that
documents at least one fully free software that can run on it.

That software would have to be able to be built and run 100% free
software.

Making that documentation available and known to the user will steer
that user toward free software.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 09:10:27 -0500
"J.B. Nicholson"  wrote:
> As I understand it, the programs MAME emulates are nonfree. If so,
> this should raise a warning because MAME is an instance of what was
> known as the Java Trap
> (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html) -- a free program
> with nonfree dependencies.
> 
> Are there any free software programs MAME emulates?
MAME doesn't emulate software, it emulates hardware.
The non-free "software" here is what runs on top of that (emulated)
hardware.

> Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on nonfree 
> software in order to run?
This is the o

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Leo]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 6:29 PM, Ivan Zaigralin 
wrote:

> Of course there are holdouts. You know of one. But they are
> disappearing, while the historical use of such emulators becomes more
> and more relevant. So while you are probably more right at this moment,
> my points are becoming more and more valid every day, and MAME is
> turning from overall malicious to useful in the near future.
>
> I mean, even your b.i.l. seems to be motivated by the retro and d.i.y.
> aspect of it all, not the ads. And the non-free software in question is
> not even utility software, it's pure entertainment, and it's perfectly
> safe. It is true we cannot study, improve, or share it, but that does
> not make _using_ it either dangerous or unethical. It makes absolutely
> no sense to protect anyone from running these games, especially if that
> results in people building cabinets and inviting friends over, instead
> of paying micro$oft or $ony to install a $500 audio/video bug their your
> house.
>
> Consider also that the software component of these things is becoming
> ever more trivial by today's standards. For an apt analogy, just think
> of these games as interactive books, and MAME as a viewer. These games
> are works of art and art historians must be able to view them. There
> will never again be a non-free software ecosystem there, but thanks to
> MAME a free software ecosystem may yet develop.
>
I think everything you presented here makes sense and I agree with it. Take
10 internet points and have a great weekend.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

Joshua Gay wrote:

The guidelines do not need to be updated in light of anything I wrote.
The paragraph explains pretty clear what distros should try to do: "A
free system distribution must not steer users towards obtaining any
nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to do so. The
system should have no repositories for nonfree software and no specific
recipes for installation of particular nonfree programs. Nor should the
distribution refer to third-party repositories that are not committed to
only including free software; even if they only have free software
today, that may not be true tomorrow. Programs in the system should not
suggest installing nonfree plugins, documentation, and so on."


I've read the text but initially I was unaware of some things that I am now 
guessing are relevant for evaluating which distros could get the FSF's 
approval. Nobody but the FSF could provide this clarity because ultimately 
these are the FSF's guidelines we're discussing. I'll try to explain why I 
thought additional explanation would have been helpful.


I see in your essay that the presence of free software code to run with 
MAME is a relevant point, but I was unaware of any freely licensed code to 
run on MAME. Therefore I asked about that. My initial unawareness left me 
with only popular arcade games such as Pac-Man, Tempest, and Donkey Kong to 
consider and these all happen to be nonfree. I also wasn't clear what 
exactly constituted "steer[ing] users towards obtaining any nonfree 
information for practical use" because MAME lists a lot information with 
the -listcrc option, for example. Here's a line from its output:


c1e6ab10 pacman.6e   mspacmanMs. Pac-Man

This shows practical technical information (CRC, a MAME game name, the more 
nicely formatted name) regarding one of the Ms. Pac-Man ROM dump files MAME 
0.172 (the first free software MAME) is known to work with. I'd expect MAME 
to give its users this information because users need to know which ROM 
dump they'll need to get that MAME to play the game. But when considering 
this information in light of the FSF free distro guidelines, it wasn't 
clear to me that this did not constitute "steer[ing] users towards 
obtaining any nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to 
do so". I guess that this is okay to do because MAME doesn't list a 
specific place to get these ROMs (such as a mailing address, a URL, or some 
other ROM download resource)?


And as I said before, your previous post on this referred to multiple other 
uses for MAME (telling me these are relevant to determining why a renamed 
MAME derivative is distributable by an FSF-approved distro) but none of 
those other uses are listed in the free distro guidelines. This initially 
left me thinking that (as I told other posters on this thread who also 
listed other uses for MAME) despite that these other uses exist, they 
aren't the criteria by which one should evaluate acceptability in a free 
system distro.


Jean Louis had also been considering this situation in 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01213.html but 
apparently reached a different conclusion than yours, "MAME clearly gives 
incentive to use non-free software". So I'm guessing there are others who 
read the guidelines, knew of MAME, and concluded that MAME cannot be 
carried by FSF-approved free software distros because MAME steers users 
toward nonfree software.


Given this unclarity it seemed reasonable to me that the guideline could 
use more explanation to help me arrive at the intended conclusion -- a MAME 
derivative with a new name (to avoid the trademark issue) would be okay to 
include in an FSF-approved free software distro so long as its documentation.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Ivan Zaigralin]

Of course there are holdouts. You know of one. But they are
disappearing, while the historical use of such emulators becomes more
and more relevant. So while you are probably more right at this moment,
my points are becoming more and more valid every day, and MAME is
turning from overall malicious to useful in the near future.

I mean, even your b.i.l. seems to be motivated by the retro and d.i.y.
aspect of it all, not the ads. And the non-free software in question is
not even utility software, it's pure entertainment, and it's perfectly
safe. It is true we cannot study, improve, or share it, but that does
not make _using_ it either dangerous or unethical. It makes absolutely
no sense to protect anyone from running these games, especially if that
results in people building cabinets and inviting friends over, instead
of paying micro$oft or $ony to install a $500 audio/video bug their your
house.

Consider also that the software component of these things is becoming
ever more trivial by today's standards. For an apt analogy, just think
of these games as interactive books, and MAME as a viewer. These games
are works of art and art historians must be able to view them. There
will never again be a non-free software ecosystem there, but thanks to
MAME a free software ecosystem may yet develop.

On 04/01/2016 01:17 PM, Leo wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 8:51 AM, Ivan Zaigralin  > wrote:
> 
> The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
> Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I mean,
> it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
> of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
> nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
> can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
> get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
> non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
> useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
> perspective, which is a good thing.
> 
> 
> I disagree with all this. My brother-in-law built an arcade-like cabinet
> and put MAME in it. He plays these games and invites his friends to play
> these games with him. A coworker is working on the same thing. They are
> not exactly obsolete if they still provide entertainment. That's like
> saying that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is obsolete because now we
> have romantic comedies in 3D.
> 
> That being said, I'm still not sure what to think of MAME, but I
> personally see it in the same level as WINE.



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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

Hello Felipe,

I wish to acknowledge that Uzebox is GPL, I checked on their Github:
http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Help.2C_Tips_.26_Tutorials

They do have their own emulator Uzebox, but they also reference to MAME:
http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Emulator

Jean Louis

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 07:24:20PM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
> yes. I already provided examples. Try to re-read this whole thread. Or
> at least the message that says:
> 
> "That's not entirely true.
> 
> MAME has got drivers for open hardware systems which run fully free
> firmware (even though their emulation is not yet working perfectly).
> Some examples that I can remember right now are:
> 
> * The Makerbot Replicator 1 3d printer and other RAMBO-based 3d
> printers running Sailfish and/or RepetierFW
> * The Uzebox DIY game console (and its full library of free software
> 8-bit games)
> * There may be more, but these are the ones that I quickly remembered
> right now."

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

yes. I already provided examples. Try to re-read this whole thread. Or
at least the message that says:

"That's not entirely true.

MAME has got drivers for open hardware systems which run fully free
firmware (even though their emulation is not yet working perfectly).
Some examples that I can remember right now are:

* The Makerbot Replicator 1 3d printer and other RAMBO-based 3d
printers running Sailfish and/or RepetierFW
* The Uzebox DIY game console (and its full library of free software
8-bit games)
* There may be more, but these are the ones that I quickly remembered
right now."



On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 7:17 PM, Jean Louis  wrote:
> I understand Felipe, thank you, I know what you mean.
>
> But is there free as in freedom possibility to run MAME in usable manner
> or with some free software?
>
> I know you made software that could run in MAME, but can I run MAME
> without loading non-free BIOS or other non-free stuff, before running
> the such?
>
> Jean Louis
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

I understand Felipe, thank you, I know what you mean.

But is there free as in freedom possibility to run MAME in usable manner
or with some free software?

I know you made software that could run in MAME, but can I run MAME
without loading non-free BIOS or other non-free stuff, before running
the such?

Jean Louis

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

Now people seem to thing that the definition of "firmware" is
something like "piece of lowlevel program without freedom-respecting
source-code" :-P That's not true! Look how crazy this situation has
got

Not only Libreboot is an example of freedom-respecting firmware
project, I could also mention the Rockbox project as well (and also
the Arduino bootloader and probably many other sw freedom projects).
Thus, it is pretty clear that "being non-free" is not a necessary
characteristic of a piece of software for it to be called "firmware".

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 7:07 PM, Felipe Sanches  wrote:
> I'm a free software activist and I use the term "free software" with
> exactly this meaning of free as in freedom. So please re-read my
> statements.
>
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Jean Louis  wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 06:47:04PM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
>>> "Please provide clear list of that, as that can help certainly.
>>> It is good to remember that "free firmware" cannot be free software,
>>> as there is no corresponding source code for that. It is firmware."
>>>
>>> This sounds pretty much non-sense to me. Maybe we have incompatible
>>> definitions of what "firmware" means. So, to make my point clear, by
>>> "firmware" I mean bare-metal software. That is... very low level
>>> software that runs on the CPUs or microcontrollers of an electronics
>>> board. And yes firmware can be free software. Libreboot is one famous
>>> example of free firmware (in particular, bootcode).
>>
>> Good! So, libreboot has the corresponding source code, right?
>>
>> Firmware or blobs are removed from mainstream Linux kernel exactly for
>> that reason that there is no source code or/and there is no free software
>> license.
>>
>> When I say "free" I mean by 4 software freedoms. Binary or blob or
>> firmware is not free without the corresponding source code. That is what
>> I meant with it: there are no "free firmware" or "free ROMs", as if
>> someone says in that manner, I would assume he gives me final product or
>> binary, which cannot be free software without the source code.
>>
>> Jean Louis
>>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

I'm a free software activist and I use the term "free software" with
exactly this meaning of free as in freedom. So please re-read my
statements.

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Jean Louis  wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 06:47:04PM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
>> "Please provide clear list of that, as that can help certainly.
>> It is good to remember that "free firmware" cannot be free software,
>> as there is no corresponding source code for that. It is firmware."
>>
>> This sounds pretty much non-sense to me. Maybe we have incompatible
>> definitions of what "firmware" means. So, to make my point clear, by
>> "firmware" I mean bare-metal software. That is... very low level
>> software that runs on the CPUs or microcontrollers of an electronics
>> board. And yes firmware can be free software. Libreboot is one famous
>> example of free firmware (in particular, bootcode).
>
> Good! So, libreboot has the corresponding source code, right?
>
> Firmware or blobs are removed from mainstream Linux kernel exactly for
> that reason that there is no source code or/and there is no free software
> license.
>
> When I say "free" I mean by 4 software freedoms. Binary or blob or
> firmware is not free without the corresponding source code. That is what
> I meant with it: there are no "free firmware" or "free ROMs", as if
> someone says in that manner, I would assume he gives me final product or
> binary, which cannot be free software without the source code.
>
> Jean Louis
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 06:47:04PM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
> "Please provide clear list of that, as that can help certainly.
> It is good to remember that "free firmware" cannot be free software,
> as there is no corresponding source code for that. It is firmware."
> 
> This sounds pretty much non-sense to me. Maybe we have incompatible
> definitions of what "firmware" means. So, to make my point clear, by
> "firmware" I mean bare-metal software. That is... very low level
> software that runs on the CPUs or microcontrollers of an electronics
> board. And yes firmware can be free software. Libreboot is one famous
> example of free firmware (in particular, bootcode).

Good! So, libreboot has the corresponding source code, right?

Firmware or blobs are removed from mainstream Linux kernel exactly for
that reason that there is no source code or/and there is no free software
license.

When I say "free" I mean by 4 software freedoms. Binary or blob or
firmware is not free without the corresponding source code. That is what
I meant with it: there are no "free firmware" or "free ROMs", as if
someone says in that manner, I would assume he gives me final product or
binary, which cannot be free software without the source code.

Jean Louis

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

"Please provide clear list of that, as that can help certainly.
It is good to remember that "free firmware" cannot be free software,
as there is no corresponding source code for that. It is firmware."

This sounds pretty much non-sense to me. Maybe we have incompatible
definitions of what "firmware" means. So, to make my point clear, by
"firmware" I mean bare-metal software. That is... very low level
software that runs on the CPUs or microcontrollers of an electronics
board. And yes firmware can be free software. Libreboot is one famous
example of free firmware (in particular, bootcode).

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Leo]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 4:31 PM, Jean Louis  wrote:

> Hello Leo,
>
> On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 03:17:06PM -0500, Leo wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 8:51 AM, Ivan Zaigralin 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
> > > Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I
> mean,
> > > it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
> > > of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
> > > nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
> > > can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
> > > get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
> > > non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
> > > useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
> > > perspective, which is a good thing.
> > >
> >
> > I disagree with all this. My brother-in-law built an arcade-like cabinet
> > and put MAME in it. He plays these games and invites his friends to play
> > these games with him. A coworker is working on the same thing. They are
> not
> > exactly obsolete if they still provide entertainment. That's like saying
> > that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is obsolete because now we have
> > romantic comedies in 3D.
> >
> > That being said, I'm still not sure what to think of MAME, but I
> personally
> > see it in the same level as WINE.
>
> Please ask him if he had to load the BIOS and blobs as required:
> http://docs.mamedev.org/basicuse/commonissues.html?highlight=bios
>
> http://docs.mamedev.org/basicuse/gettingstarted.html#bios-dumps-and-software
>
> Basically, he uses non-free software, and I don't know how it relates to
> free-software demand.
>
> Jean Louis
>
> Yes, he does use nonfree software and he doesn't care about free software
one bit. My point is not that. My point is that the ROMs for games can
provide an incentive to use non-free software and the games are not
obsolete nor useless.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Jean Louis]

Hello Leo,

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 03:17:06PM -0500, Leo wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 8:51 AM, Ivan Zaigralin 
> wrote:
> 
> > The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
> > Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I mean,
> > it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
> > of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
> > nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
> > can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
> > get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
> > non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
> > useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
> > perspective, which is a good thing.
> >
> 
> I disagree with all this. My brother-in-law built an arcade-like cabinet
> and put MAME in it. He plays these games and invites his friends to play
> these games with him. A coworker is working on the same thing. They are not
> exactly obsolete if they still provide entertainment. That's like saying
> that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is obsolete because now we have
> romantic comedies in 3D.
> 
> That being said, I'm still not sure what to think of MAME, but I personally
> see it in the same level as WINE.

Please ask him if he had to load the BIOS and blobs as required:
http://docs.mamedev.org/basicuse/commonissues.html?highlight=bios
http://docs.mamedev.org/basicuse/gettingstarted.html#bios-dumps-and-software

Basically, he uses non-free software, and I don't know how it relates to
free-software demand.

Jean Louis

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Leo]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 8:51 AM, Ivan Zaigralin 
wrote:

> The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
> Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I mean,
> it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
> of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
> nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
> can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
> get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
> non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
> useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
> perspective, which is a good thing.
>

I disagree with all this. My brother-in-law built an arcade-like cabinet
and put MAME in it. He plays these games and invites his friends to play
these games with him. A coworker is working on the same thing. They are not
exactly obsolete if they still provide entertainment. That's like saying
that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is obsolete because now we have
romantic comedies in 3D.

That being said, I'm still not sure what to think of MAME, but I personally
see it in the same level as WINE.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Leo]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Leo  wrote:

> That being said, I'm still not sure what to think of MAME, but I
> personally see it in the same level as WINE.
>

I would like to correct this statement. I see MAME more along the lines of
SCUMMVM. There are some clear examples of free software for Windows that
can run on WINE and new software is being developed for Windows all the
time (both free and nonfree). SCUMMVM, on the other hand, is for games that
are no longer being developed and most of them (with only 2 exceptions,
AFAIK) are nonfree. Nobody is going to develop for SCUMMVM, just like
nobody will develop for MAME, except maybe only as a programming challenge.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

Hello,

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 03:09:44PM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
>  wrote:
> >> Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on nonfree
> >> software in order to run?
> > It's the other way around.
> > As I understand it, only non-free software running on top of MAME (or
> > the hardware it emulates) exist.
> 
> If that's your understanding, than it seems you misunderstand it.
> There have been examples of free firmware running on top of hardware
> emulated by MAME already listed earlier in this very same thread.

Please provide clear list of that, as that can help certainly.

It is good to remember that "free firmware" cannot be free software, as there
is no corresponding source code for that. It is firmware.

Free ROM cannot be free software without source code and possibility to
compile it with free software.

As it was me who started this discussion, now I understand that there
are those who are conservative and those who are more liberal. I don't
look into fact that MAME® is free software, rather into the fact that:

- MAME® website was referenced from GuixSD distribution, from the
  proposed package for MAME®

- that on their website they don't provide and never did in the past,
  any free software for users, but rather proprietary ROMs

- that users would be thus driven to the website where they would run
  proprietary game ROMs
  
- that users of free software distribution GuixSD would search for MAME®
  almost exclusively to run those proprietary ROMs

- even if there is some free software to run on MAME®, it would be
  insignificant use in comparison to how many people would be driven to
  the proprietary ROMs,

- we also need to consider practical side, not just theoretical, but
  practical side is that MAME® is indeed used to run proprietary ROMs

If it would be my personal project, I would not include it. Personal
opinion and stand, as I would avoid advertising non-free software
through package definition or through inclusion of the words "MAME"
emulator. 

Jean Louis

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 09:10:27 -0500
"J.B. Nicholson"  wrote:
> Are there any free software programs MAME emulates?
MAME doesn't emulate software, it emulates hardware.
What is non-free here is the software running on top of that (emulated)
hardware.

> Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on nonfree 
> software in order to run?
It's the other way around.
As I understand it, only non-free software running on top of MAME (or
the hardware it emulates) exist.

> As I understand it, the programs MAME emulates are nonfree. If so,
> this should raise a warning because MAME is an instance of what was
> known as the Java Trap
> (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html) -- a free program
> with nonfree dependencies.
Again, the java trap is the opposite situation, free software required
a non-free java implementation to run at the time.
To make an analogy, the MAME equivalent with java would be if the java
implementation was free software, but only non-free software was
written in java.

Denis.


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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Joshua Gay]

On 04/01/2016 12:02 AM, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
> I agree that users will want to run emulators for a number of perfectly
> valid reasons, but I've been unable to find anything in the guidelines
> at https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
> which uses those reasons as a rationale for concluding it's okay to
> distribute one's fork of MAME.
> 
> After reading your thoughts I'm left with the impression that inducing
> users to obtain proprietary software is still an important thing to
> avoid;

This is true. And, as far as I can tell, a user downloading a fork of
MAME will be downloading a free software program. So if the
documentation and the program do not steer users toward downloading
proprietary software, then there is no inducing users to obtain
proprietary software. There are also plenty of free software ROMs
available for MAME. If one recommends software to use with the fork of
MAME being distributed, then one should recommend only free software.

-- 
Joshua Gay
Licensing & Compliance Manager  
Free Software Foundation
GPG key ID: 8DA625BBWhat's a GPG key ID?
See our Email Self-Defense Guide:

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Ivan Zaigralin]

The point of emulators like this one is to preserve software history.
Yes, it emulates non-free software. No, it's no longer relevant. I mean,
it's no longer relevant as software, but only as the historical record
of what entertainment software was like in the times of yore. New
nonfree games are being written today in order to seduce people, so I
can see why something like wine is dangerous, but no one, no one will
get seduced by a museum piece. MAME does not give any incentive to use
non-free software, because all of this old software is obsolete and
useless. But it does give an ability to study it from the historical
perspective, which is a good thing.

On 03/29/2016 09:31 AM, alírio eyng wrote:
> 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
> gnu-linux-libre@nongnu.org
> 
> [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
> 
> 



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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Ricardo Wurmus]

alírio eyng  writes:

> Isaac David:
>> However in the last few days I have
>>seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
>>imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
>>without leaving your comfy libre OS.
> source code is out of question for a distro, unless you want to
> compile and execute it (or just have a package that copy the source
> code); but developing without a game is like developing without a test
> suite...

I don’t understand this.  I regularly look at the sources of programmes
I find interesting.  Guix makes this very easy with

guix build -S name

You don’t have to compile and execute it to find source code useful.

I also disagree with the second part of the last sentence.  You don’t
have to hack on the emulator, but you can hack on an existing free game
or write your own.

> expecting the user to evaluate if some game is free is making it
> unnecessarily difficult to remain in freedom
> making game packages/executables and not emulator packages/executables
> would allow all know good uses and still signal the user to be
> cautious with other games

This limits the use of the emulator.  You seem to think that an emulator
is only useful as a runtime dependency for a game, but I and others in
this thread disagree.

~~ Ricardo

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

On 4/1/16, Ricardo Wurmus  wrote:
> alírio eyng  writes:
>> Isaac David:
>>> However in the last few days I have
>>>seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
>>>imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
>>>without leaving your comfy libre OS.
>> source code is out of question for a distro, unless you want to
>> compile and execute it (or just have a package that copy the source
>> code); but developing without a game is like developing without a test
>> suite...
> I don’t understand this.  I regularly look at the sources of programmes
> I find interesting.
how do you find it interesting without executing it?

> You don’t have to compile and execute it to find source code useful.
agreed; but as i argued, if you never will execute, just have a
package that copy the source code or not include in the distro

> You don’t
> have to hack on the emulator, but you can hack on an existing free game
> or write your own.
agreed
a free game would be allowed by conservative approach as i described
a free game would only be disallowed by extremely conservative
approach as i described, that i reject

>> expecting the user to evaluate if some game is free is making it
>> unnecessarily difficult to remain in freedom
>> making game packages/executables and not emulator packages/executables
>> would allow all know good uses and still signal the user to be
>> cautious with other games
>
> This limits the use of the emulator.  You seem to think that an emulator
> is only useful as a runtime dependency for a game, but I and others in
> this thread disagree.
i want to allow all good uses, they all can have exceptions
i believe the best way to _actively protect_ freedom is with a policy
with some compromise, this don't mean the exceptions justify changing
the rule
you seem to think i'm defending extremely conservative, that i reject
most people in this thread seem only choosing between extremely
conservative or extremely liberal, i reject extremely conservative; so
i also would prefer extremely liberal, if that was a binary choice;
i'm arguing it isn't

i believe the _main_ use of a emulator is as a runtime dependency for
a game, and we should apply the same reasoning behind ndiswrapper
"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"[1]
obviously i can say i want to look at ndiswrapper source code, and
this should be allowed
but this don't justify including ndiswrapper executable in a free distro

[1]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

Joshua Gay wrote:

I've thought a lot about this issue. Here are my thoughts and concerns
on the idea behind this project and on packaging and redistributing it.


First, thanks so much for your considerate view of things here. It's great 
to see someone at the FSF participate in the discussion and take an 
interest in emulators.


I agree that users will want to run emulators for a number of perfectly 
valid reasons, but I've been unable to find anything in the guidelines at 
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html which 
uses those reasons as a rationale for concluding it's okay to distribute 
one's fork of MAME.


After reading your thoughts I'm left with the impression that inducing 
users to obtain proprietary software is still an important thing to avoid; 
the FSF's guidelines for free distros and 
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-program.html also 
says this must be avoided. I also see that you're giving advice about 
distributing one's fork of MAME. Hence I have to ask: can an FSF-approved 
free software distribution distribute a renamed, trademark-removed variant 
of MAME and still qualify for being called an FSF-approved free software 
distribution?


Whatever the answer to that question, I hope that the guidelines for free 
software distros at 
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html will 
be updated to help us understand the answer and rationale so we have 
something to point to when this issue comes up again and possibly avoid the 
confusion that led to this thread.


Depending on how this comes out, another essay 
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-program.html should 
be considered for updating too because this essay also stresses the 
importance of not urging others to use nonfree software.


Thanks again for your input.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Matt Lee]

There are GPL licensed ROM images. Debian ships them for ZX Spectrum
emulators, where the copyright holder (British Sky Broadcasting) makes
other versions available only under effectively NC-ND terms. Instead Debian
was able to convince the original development team of the benefits. I don't
believe this is an isolated case either.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Julian Marchant]

On 03/31/2016 12:01 PM, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
> Julian Marchant wrote:
>> As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre.
> 
> How do you figure this?

How do I figure that I am unaware of any libre Flash objects? Well, it's
my own brain and memory. I think I'm the only authority on that. Please
note that I didn't claim that no libre Flash objects exist, only that
this seems to be the case based on what I know. This is, of course,
because I am not aware of any libre Flash objects. It's the same way
that you might be unaware of any libre programs that can run in MAME: it
could be that there really are none, or it could be that you just
haven't found it.

That's my point: you can't just declare that a program is dependent on
proprietary software based on the fact that its job is to run code, and
you are unaware of any libre code it could run. You might just not be
looking hard enough, or libre code it can run might be written tomorrow.

-- 
Julian Marchant
https://onpon4.github.io

Protect your privacy with GnuPG:
https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org



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Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

Isaac David:
>Parabola does ship fully free emulators for which no free games
>exist. At this moment the user has to opt-in for installing
>your-freedom_emu to block those packages, so it actually falls
>down somewhere between your "liberal" and "extremely liberal"
>categories.
"parabola follows extremely liberal without your-freedom_emu"
i thought it was common knowledge/implicit, my mistake

>My view was that while useless in a 100% free environment just
>having them installed and inspecting their user interfaces wouldn't
>violate your freedom in any way. A free emulator with free
>dependencies wouldn't be unethical unless it recommended using
>proprietary software with it.
agreed, but we shouldn't package useless things

> However in the last few days I have
>seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
>imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
>without leaving your comfy libre OS.
source code is out of question for a distro, unless you want to
compile and execute it (or just have a package that copy the source
code); but developing without a game is like developing without a test
suite...
"testing portability without leaving your comfy libre os" would only
be impeded by extremely conservative, that i reject

>In a distro without unprivileged package management like Parabola
>an opt-in blacklist could satisfy Jean Louis' parenting concerns, but
>only until the point the unprivileged users determined to run non-free
>software learn to look for applications outside the package manager.
applying a policy to unwilling people is a security issue, out of question
i'm interested in lessening the effort to remain in freedom (for
people willing it)
but your-freedom_emu is extremely conservative, it deny free uses; that i reject

>Meanwhile other emulators and wine are completely out of the
>question because there's free applications for them
i translate it as "extremely conservative/conservative is completely
out of the question"

you missed the main argument
"extremely liberal is naive because it just looks down in the
dependency dag, there's no reason to not look up"
i think i should try to explain better, included is a image
(emulator-dependency-dag.svg)
to _execute_ an emulator _usefully_, and to test during development,
we need all dependencies and a game
every one agree that if one dependency is nonfree, we can't _execute_
an emulator _usefully_ in freedom
several people miss: if all games are nonfree, we also can't _execute_
an emulator _usefully_ in freedom

maybe an analogy:
*extremely conservative is like nonfree software
*conservative is like agpl
*liberal is like gpl
*extremely liberal is like public domain
nonfree software is unreasonable (unethical) because it denies freedom
public domain is unreasonable (not unethical) because it doesn't protect freedom
gpl restrict freedom _directly_; gpl2 can't be linked with gpl3, even
both being free software; but it gives more freedom _indirectly_; and
in most cases we can make an exception, just releasing the gpl2 as
gpl2+
agpl gives yet more freedom, although it is more inconvenient in some cases

so agpl is better, gpl ok and public domain unreasonable (not
unethical), if your aim is freedom
_not denying_ freedom and _actively protecting_ it are different
even if _actively protecting_ freedom is inconvenient and we need to
make some exceptions, i believe it is better

expecting the user to evaluate if some game is free is making it
unnecessarily difficult to remain in freedom
making game packages/executables and not emulator packages/executables
would allow all know good uses and still signal the user to be
cautious with other games

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Joshua Gay]

I've thought a lot about this issue. Here are my thoughts and concerns
on the idea behind this project and on packaging and redistributing it.

## The purpose of MAME and archiving old systems

The stated purpose of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator project is to
document and reproduce through emulation the inner components of arcade
machines, computers, consoles, chess computers, calculators, and many
other types of electronic amusement machines, in order to preserve
decades of arcade, computer, and console history.

In general, I think this is probably a good initiative. Here are my
reasons why as well as some warnings and other considerations for those
who wish to package and redistribute MAME.

Please keep in mind that my comments here are not necessarily all
generally applicable to modern systems and programs that are currently
in use. In many cases my comments might make sense when discussing a
computer program that is 38 years old but might not be as applicable to
some new sofware designed for modern computers.


### Proprietary source code can become free software

First, I think its important to recognize that many old programs are
stored in ROMs which consist of machine code or assembler code that is
either exactly or a close approximation to being in the preferred form
of modification. Those that are not in the preferred form for making
modification might eventually be able to be reverse engineered and
source code rewritten to provide a close approximation to the original
source code. Eventually all ROMs that have formats that are preferred
forms for making modifications available will likely be put into the
public domain or otherwise be considered uninhibited by laws across most
legal jurisdictions (assuming length of copyright is not infinite). In a
country like the US, that may take some time, but, on the otherhand, you
could already be in a legal jurisdiction where the laws are different,
and perhaps already you can share the source code of a given ROM as free
software in that jurisdiction (again assuming there is a preferred form
for making modifications). There is also the possibility that the
copyright holder might be willing to license or release the work into
the public domain or that copyright laws in various jurisdiction could
change.

### Good reasons to be able to run proprietary software

We do not want to encourage the proliferation and spread of proprietary
software. We want a world in which poprietary software is replaced with
only free sotware. However, we can't change the past or the fact that
there was a whole lot of software that was proprietary that people used.

In many cases, a person wanting to run some old (perhaps very old)
proprietary software within a free software emulator is not doing it
because they lack a better or preferred version of free software to
accomplish the task. Often it is simply to understand the past. To see
what a computer program looked and behaved like a long time ago. There
are many reasons why it might be of value for people to be able to do
such things. For example, a person doing some historical or
anthropological research might be trying to understand the relationship
of the tools and technology of the time with some event, behavior, or
other endeavour. Being able to run the software could be useful. Or a
person tring to understand the conceptual development of computer user
interfaces and design might wish to run a program.

Or, maybe, it is as simple as a person reading a book or a journal from
the time and they come across some passage that explains some game or
thing a person was playing and they simply want to see what that looked
like to satisfy a curiousity.

Yet another reason it might be useful for a purpose to run such systems
and programs is to be able to extract or export data or artwork. For
example, a person might have some old software and data files that they
would like to convert to a format that works with free software. It
might be that the only practical or feasible way to do this would be to
run the data file in the old program and then convert/export the data
file into a format that can then be used by free software programs. Or
alternatively the software itself may have art or data files embedded in
it that could be extracted by running it on the original system via the
emulator. If the aim is to move data or art from the nonfree
program/system to a free program, then that is probably a good thing.

It's hard for me to think that a person running very old proprietary
systems and programs for purposes along these lines would be oppossing
free software or in anyway diminishing or reducing the spread of free
sofware. Further, the goal would not be to be running proprietary
software to accomplish ones computing, except so far as to migrate some
functionial parts from proprietary systm to a free system.

There could be other reasons that do work against the goals of the free
software movement, so we don't want to 

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

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  wrote:
> J.B. Nicholson  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

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jason Self]

J.B. Nicholson  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

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

actually: GPL v2 or later.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 1:13 PM,   wrote:
> On 2016-03-31 17:01, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
>>
>> Julian Marchant wrote:
>>>
>>> As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre.
>>
>>
>> How do you figure this?
>>
>>> This is the error in your reasoning: even if it's true that there is no
>>> libre software at all available for any of the systems MAME emulates,
>>> that doesn't necessarily mean that MAME requires proprietary software to
>>> work. From our perspective, that case is no different from if no
>>> software at all existed for the systems. That would make MAME useless
>>> today, but not unethical.
>>
>>
>> I don't see how that addresses the inducement criteria listed in the
>> FSF's free distro guidelines and that isn't the situation with MAME.
>> If the only software one can run with MAME is nonfree then a distro
>> distributing MAME encourages the user to find that nonfree software.
>> As far as I can tell from the two mentions of inducing the user to run
>> nonfree software in the FSF's free distro guidelines (once in the
>> licensing section, another in the firmware section) inducement to run
>> nonfree software is important to avoid. This tells me MAME ought not
>> be a part of an FSF-approved free distro. Users who want MAME will
>> have a minor inconvenience of getting MAME another way.
>
>
> Please reconsider in light of: The freedom to run the program as you wish,
> for any purpose (freedom 0).
>
> It is a little worrying to me that people are talking about excluding a free
> software program - in fact a GPL2 licensed one - on the basis of what it
> might be used for. What if people started demanding removal of "hacking
> tools" [1] like gdb and nmap even though they are invaluable for debugging?
>
> I'm not saying anyone is obligated to include this in their free distro but
> I hope a consensus will come that it is acceptable, as any free software
> program should be. Especially after they have gone through the work of
> re-licensing it as GPL2.
>
> * [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_german_hack.html
>
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[rain1]

On 2016-03-31 17:01, J.B. Nicholson wrote:

Julian Marchant wrote:

As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre.


How do you figure this?

This is the error in your reasoning: even if it's true that there is 
no

libre software at all available for any of the systems MAME emulates,
that doesn't necessarily mean that MAME requires proprietary software 
to

work. From our perspective, that case is no different from if no
software at all existed for the systems. That would make MAME useless
today, but not unethical.


I don't see how that addresses the inducement criteria listed in the
FSF's free distro guidelines and that isn't the situation with MAME.
If the only software one can run with MAME is nonfree then a distro
distributing MAME encourages the user to find that nonfree software.
As far as I can tell from the two mentions of inducing the user to run
nonfree software in the FSF's free distro guidelines (once in the
licensing section, another in the firmware section) inducement to run
nonfree software is important to avoid. This tells me MAME ought not
be a part of an FSF-approved free distro. Users who want MAME will
have a minor inconvenience of getting MAME another way.


Please reconsider in light of: The freedom to run the program as you 
wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).


It is a little worrying to me that people are talking about excluding a 
free software program - in fact a GPL2 licensed one - on the basis of 
what it might be used for. What if people started demanding removal of 
"hacking tools" [1] like gdb and nmap even though they are invaluable 
for debugging?


I'm not saying anyone is obligated to include this in their free distro 
but I hope a consensus will come that it is acceptable, as any free 
software program should be. Especially after they have gone through the 
work of re-licensing it as GPL2.


* [1] 
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/new_german_hack.html

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

Julian Marchant wrote:

As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre.


How do you figure this?


This is the error in your reasoning: even if it's true that there is no
libre software at all available for any of the systems MAME emulates,
that doesn't necessarily mean that MAME requires proprietary software to
work. From our perspective, that case is no different from if no
software at all existed for the systems. That would make MAME useless
today, but not unethical.


I don't see how that addresses the inducement criteria listed in the FSF's 
free distro guidelines and that isn't the situation with MAME. If the only 
software one can run with MAME is nonfree then a distro distributing MAME 
encourages the user to find that nonfree software. As far as I can tell 
from the two mentions of inducing the user to run nonfree software in the 
FSF's free distro guidelines (once in the licensing section, another in the 
firmware section) inducement to run nonfree software is important to avoid. 
This tells me MAME ought not be a part of an FSF-approved free distro. 
Users who want MAME will have a minor inconvenience of getting MAME another 
way.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Isaac David]

Hi,

Parabola does ship fully free emulators for which no free games
exist. At this moment the user has to opt-in for installing
your-freedom_emu to block those packages, so it actually falls
down somewhere between your "liberal" and "extremely liberal"
categories.

My view was that while useless in a 100% free environment just
having them installed and inspecting their user interfaces wouldn't
violate your freedom in any way. A free emulator with free
dependencies wouldn't be unethical unless it recommended using
proprietary software with it. However in the last few days I have
seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
without leaving your comfy libre OS.

In a distro without unprivileged package management like Parabola
an opt-in blacklist could satisfy Jean Louis' parenting concerns, but
only until the point the unprivileged users determined to run non-free
software learn to look for applications outside the package manager.

(I lied. Parabola has unprivileged package management thanks to
Guix)[1]

Meanwhile other emulators and wine are completely out of the
question because there's free applications for them, even though
using the non-free ones is more common. Parabola documents emulators
extensively in a wiki page.[2] The wiki also considers aspects such
as the possibility of writing free software for free emulator
platforms which currently have no free games/applications as far as
it's known (i,e. whether free toolchains targeting those platforms
exist). I also had a good laugh learning about free emulators that
will only run on wine.


[1]: https://www.parabola.nu/packages/?q=guix
[2]: https://wiki.parabola.nu/Emulator_licensing_issues

Le mar. 29 mars 2016 à 10:31, alírio eyng  a 
écrit :

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
gnu-linux-libre@nongnu.org

[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

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Julian Marchant]

On 03/31/2016 12:59 AM, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
> MAME requires nonfree code (game ROMs) to run the game. As far as I know
> all MAME ROMs are nonfree.

As far as I know, all Flash objects are non-libre. Flash objects usually
contain ActionScript code, i.e. programs. But this is a rather
insubstantial point. As far as I knew last year, all NES code was
proprietary, and then I found out that there's a libre homebrew NES game
called "Escape from Pong".

This is the error in your reasoning: even if it's true that there is no
libre software at all available for any of the systems MAME emulates,
that doesn't necessarily mean that MAME requires proprietary software to
work. From our perspective, that case is no different from if no
software at all existed for the systems. That would make MAME useless
today, but not unethical.

-- 
Julian Marchant
https://onpon4.github.io

Protect your privacy with GnuPG:
https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

I think I've identified a difference between Gnash and MAME/MESS pertinent 
to this thread -- a requirement of nonfree code:


MAME requires nonfree code (game ROMs) to run the game. As far as I know 
all MAME ROMs are nonfree.


MESS emulates many computer systems and (of the code I've seen so far) each 
emulator loads nonfree system ROMs in addition to running whatever program 
the user wants emulated under MESS. Therefore, for example, if the user 
wants to run a free program on an emulated Apple IIgs, MESS will load ROM 
files as well (read the ROM_LOAD() calls in src/mame/driver/apple2gs.cpp to 
see the names, CRCs, and SHA1 hashes of these files). I'm presuming that 
these ROM files are all nonfree as I am not able to find source code for 
any of them.


Gnash can be run completely in freedom: Gnash requires no nonfree code to 
play a free Flash program. As far as I know, Gnash has no nonfree 
dependencies (despite being useful to play nonfree Flash programs).

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jason Self]

Jean Louis  wrote ..

> I have made mistake, I wanted to say:
> 
> there is NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE PIECE OF FREE ROM that was made for 
> MAME that is on their website. Not outside of MAME website.

But it shows that a given program can have multiple uses.

Chris Webber has a well-written reply to a similar thread that you
started with Guix:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01267.html

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

Hello,

I have made mistake, I wanted to say:

there is NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE PIECE OF FREE ROM that was made for MAME
that is on their website. Not outside of MAME website. The project MAME
does not make the project with the purpose to create free software. They
distribute ROMs which are not free.

I am not telling you nor anyone not to use MAME. I am saying that such
emulator shall not be included in the free software distribution. For
economical, practical and freedom reasons.

You can certainly download emulator and run it for your purposes, right?
Why would Hydra, machines, donations go for distribution of MAME? MAME
project development has no history of any intentions to use MAME with
free software (ROMs), but they have history of usage of non-free ROMs.

Jean Louis

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 05:36:42AM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
> >   So far, out of all the "history and museum for ROMs", that is
> >   mentioned on MAME website, there is NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE PIECE OF FREE
> >   SOFTWARE that was made for MAME.
> 
> Please, don't make false statements:
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/maincpu.asm
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/Pixo/pixo_maincpu.c
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGZchmwxTrA=true

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

I gotta tell you though, that not shipping MAME as a binary package is
probably the right thing to do. Because the educational value of MAME
is on its source code, so I highly encourage people to grab the
sources from git and build from source, so that they'll have direct
access to the technical specification that is described in each
machine driver.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 5:36 AM, Felipe Sanches  wrote:
>>   So far, out of all the "history and museum for ROMs", that is
>>   mentioned on MAME website, there is NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE PIECE OF FREE
>>   SOFTWARE that was made for MAME.
>
> Please, don't make false statements:
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/maincpu.asm
> https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/Pixo/pixo_maincpu.c
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGZchmwxTrA=true

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

>   So far, out of all the "history and museum for ROMs", that is
>   mentioned on MAME website, there is NOT EVEN ONE SINGLE PIECE OF FREE
>   SOFTWARE that was made for MAME.

Please, don't make false statements:
https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/
https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/maincpu.asm
https://github.com/garoa/GunSmoke/blob/master/homebrew/Pixo/pixo_maincpu.c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGZchmwxTrA=true

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 11:08:56 -0300
Felipe Sanches  wrote:

> That's also the case for any other free-software emulator, though. Any
> idea how we've dealt with this in cases such as dosbox, and other free
> software emulators?
I believe that the wiki page explains that.

I make confusions between dosbox and dosemu. While I think that both
are free software, one of them depends on freedos, which is also free
but requires a non-free compiler(under the openwatcom license) to be
built.

Denis.


pgpZEsC455Vr_.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

yes, Matt is right. Even though nowadays MAME and MESS got merged into
a single project called simply MAME.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 5:32 PM, Matt Lee  wrote:
> The majority of video game systems that MAME can emulate have very
> little in the way of free software that can run on them, but MAME also
> includes the MESS emulator for various older home computers. These
> home computers have lots of free software available for them.
>
> The situation is no different to DOSBOX, which is already in free systems.
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] 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
gnu-linux-libre@nongnu.org

[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

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

What are the goals of Gnash ?

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 2:18 PM, J.B. Nicholson  wrote:
> Felipe Sanches wrote:
>>
>> Such museum (without any ROM file) is now fully free, regardless of
>> what you might attempt to do with it at runtime after compiling it.
>
>
> Practical emulator usage requires some program to run, and in MAME's case
> those programs are nonfree perhaps with a few exceptions.
>
>> The source code is the most important portion of the MAME project,
>> because it is though the source code that the goal of "preserving the
>> history of gaming and computing hardware" is achieved. The runtime
>> binaries tend to be seen as a mere collateral effect of the hardware
>> documentation efforts (also providing evidence that the hw
>> documentation is probably accurate).
>
>
> I think it's important not to conflate goals. Despite reaching the goals
> MAME's developers set out for MAME, why should MAME be included as part of
> an FSF-approved free software distribution
> (https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html) when
> practical usage appears to violate the requirement that "A free system
> distribution must not steer users towards obtaining any nonfree information
> for practical use, or encourage them to do so."?
>
> If MAME's practical use can't meet this requirement, MAME's description on
> https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#MAME
> should change to something that explains MAME "steer[s or encourages] users
> towards obtaining nonfree information for practical use".
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

Felipe Sanches wrote:

Such museum (without any ROM file) is now fully free, regardless of
what you might attempt to do with it at runtime after compiling it.


Practical emulator usage requires some program to run, and in MAME's case 
those programs are nonfree perhaps with a few exceptions.



The source code is the most important portion of the MAME project,
because it is though the source code that the goal of "preserving the
history of gaming and computing hardware" is achieved. The runtime
binaries tend to be seen as a mere collateral effect of the hardware
documentation efforts (also providing evidence that the hw
documentation is probably accurate).


I think it's important not to conflate goals. Despite reaching the goals 
MAME's developers set out for MAME, why should MAME be included as part of 
an FSF-approved free software distribution 
(https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html) when 
practical usage appears to violate the requirement that "A free system 
distribution must not steer users towards obtaining any nonfree information 
for practical use, or encourage them to do so."?


If MAME's practical use can't meet this requirement, MAME's description on 
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#MAME 
should change to something that explains MAME "steer[s or encourages] users 
towards obtaining nonfree information for practical use".

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

One interesting aspect of MAME is that the source code itself is key
to its mission. Even if you do not run the code, it is already
fulfilling its goals, which can be described as a "hardware museum in
the shape of technical specifications".

Such museum (without any ROM file) is now fully free, regardless of
what you might attempt to do with it at runtime after compiling it.
The source code is the most important portion of the MAME project,
because it is though the source code that the goal of "preserving the
history of gaming and computing hardware" is achieved. The runtime
binaries tend to be seen as a mere collateral effect of the hardware
documentation efforts (also providing evidence that the hw
documentation is probably accurate).



On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:10 AM, J.B. Nicholson  wrote:
> ra...@openmailbox.org wrote:
>>
>> The MAME project has recently re-licensed the project to GPL2 (with GPL3
>> parts). It is now free software. http://mamedev.org/?p=422
>
>
> Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on nonfree
> software in order to run?
>
> As I understand it, the programs MAME emulates are nonfree. If so, this
> should raise a warning because MAME is an instance of what was known as the
> Java Trap (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html) -- a free program
> with nonfree dependencies.
>
> Are there any free software programs MAME emulates?
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Jean Louis]

Hello,

It would be good to nicely understand the issues I have pointed to in
this discussion:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01213.html

and to seek legal advice by an attorney of FSF in regards to trademark
usage.

In regards to free software distribution guidelines, as written here:
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html

I don't agree that MAME should be included, including many of other
emulators, in the free software distributions, for reasons above
explained in the discussion I have started.

Jean Louis

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:08:56AM -0300, Felipe Sanches wrote:
> I can see good usages of the MAME codebase for documentation of the
> history of computer hardware. (I do it VERY often).
> 
> Or for running homebrew free implementations of games on the emulator
> (I already did that myself a couple times).
> 
> It seems like the source package is undisputably free, while the
> binary package is also free, but inducing users to download and run
> non-free ROMs.
> 
> That's also the case for any other free-software emulator, though. Any
> idea how we've dealt with this in cases such as dosbox, and other free
> software emulators?
> 
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Felipe Sanches  wrote:
> > The codebase is now fully free. But the vast majority of games
> > (perhaps all of them) require non-free ROMs. So this is a special case
> > that requires some thought.
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 8:57 PM,   wrote:
> >> Hello
> >>
> >> The MAME project has recently re-licensed the project to GPL2 (with GPL3
> >> parts). It is now free software. http://mamedev.org/?p=422
> >>
> >> Please consider updating the entry here to reflect this, since it is now 
> >> out
> >> of date:
> >> https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#MAME
> >>
> >> Thank you!
> >>
> 

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[J.B. Nicholson]

ra...@openmailbox.org wrote:

The MAME project has recently re-licensed the project to GPL2 (with GPL3
parts). It is now free software. http://mamedev.org/?p=422


Wouldn't this change make MAME free software that depends on nonfree 
software in order to run?


As I understand it, the programs MAME emulates are nonfree. If so, this 
should raise a warning because MAME is an instance of what was known as the 
Java Trap (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html) -- a free program 
with nonfree dependencies.


Are there any free software programs MAME emulates?

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[rain1]

On 2016-03-29 15:05, Felipe Sanches wrote:

The codebase is now fully free. But the vast majority of games
(perhaps all of them) require non-free ROMs. So this is a special case
that requires some thought.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 8:57 PM,   wrote:

Hello

The MAME project has recently re-licensed the project to GPL2 (with 
GPL3

parts). It is now free software. http://mamedev.org/?p=422

Please consider updating the entry here to reflect this, since it is 
now out

of date:
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#MAME

Thank you!



Thanks for the reply!

There is a discussion about this on guix-devel 
 
which may be of interest.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Felipe Sanches]

The codebase is now fully free. But the vast majority of games
(perhaps all of them) require non-free ROMs. So this is a special case
that requires some thought.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 8:57 PM,   wrote:
> Hello
>
> The MAME project has recently re-licensed the project to GPL2 (with GPL3
> parts). It is now free software. http://mamedev.org/?p=422
>
> Please consider updating the entry here to reflect this, since it is now out
> of date:
> https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#MAME
>
> Thank you!
>

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME license non-free

[Sam Geeraerts]

Rubén Rodríguez wrote:

I thought MAME was an old-timer in Debian non-free (making it at
least suspicious), but apparently it only just got added. 


It just entered Ubuntu universe with maverick, replacing sdlmame (which
was in multiverse). Maybe they are relaxing their policies a bit more.


Ubuntu component info [1] says that multiverse contains software that 
that does not meet the Ubuntu main component license policy [2]. This 
implies (and I think it's also explicitly stated on ubuntu.com 
somewhere) that universe software should meet main license policy. That 
policy says must allow redistribution, including your right to sell. 
So it seems like a bug to me.


It's annoying that Ubuntu doesn't publish any motivations for putting a 
package in a certain component or for moving it between components.


[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/components
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/licensing

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME license non-free

[Sam Geeraerts]

Rubén Rodríguez wrote:

The license for the MAME package restricts commercial distribution:

Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial
product or activity.

I'm adding it to the blacklist.


I thought MAME was an old-timer in Debian non-free (making it at least 
suspicious), but apparently it only just got added. The MAME license 
being non-free was hinted at a few months ago [1]. Luckily it was never 
an issue for gNewSense because we don't carry non-free.


It's a useful addition to the NONFSDG list because I think many people 
assume it is free.


[1] 
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2010-09/msg00088.html

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME license non-free

[Rubén Rodríguez]

 I thought MAME was an old-timer in Debian non-free (making it at
 least suspicious), but apparently it only just got added. 

It just entered Ubuntu universe with maverick, replacing sdlmame (which
was in multiverse). Maybe they are relaxing their policies a bit more.

Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME license non-free

[Graziano Sorbaioli]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2011 23:00:54 +0200, Rubén Rodríguez wrote:

I thought MAME was an old-timer in Debian non-free (making it at
least suspicious), but apparently it only just got added.


It just entered Ubuntu universe with maverick, replacing sdlmame 
(which
was in multiverse). Maybe they are relaxing their policies a bit 
more.



Same for Natty it seems:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/mame



--
Graziano Sorbaioli
Founder, LibrePlanet Italia
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:LibrePlanet_Italia

[GNU-linux-libre] MAME license non-free

[Rubén Rodríguez]

The license for the MAME package restricts commercial distribution:

Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial
product or activity.

I'm adding it to the blacklist.

Via https://trisquel.info/en/issues/3453