I wrote considerably more but a non-representative excerpt quoted read:
It's not that running nonfree games is acceptable, it's that games don't
typically require the degree of compatibility other software requires.
to which lc...@dcc.ufmg.br replied:
What do you mean? Free software is not about compatibility. The FSF or
RMS would certainly argue that the software part (not the graphics, the
sounds, the story, etc.) of a video game must be free software to be
ethical. A specific point is that malware can be (and often is, e.g.,
DRM) implemented in video games.
Contrary to your response, I did explain that I understand the free
software takes an ethical stance and said as much in text you didn't reproduce.
Sometimes there is no source code to license, share, or edit. Sometimes the
source is lost or the source code is the distributed machine code. This
means one faces a different consideration than one faces for modern
programs where source code is available and different than what's
distributed. Older games come up with difficulties like this.
Regarding game art: It's not always clear how to replace art not licensed
to share even verbatim. In some older games the art in the game is not
separate from the rest of the game code.
There are also some practical problems regarding what we need to get out of
emulating old systems to run older software. For now, sharing copies of
machine code dumped from old storage media and writing emulators to read
and run that code seems to suffice. Unfortunately we do this without the
copyright holder's permission. Modern copyright law is useful when we write
code from scratch and license it to others under a free license, or write
new free software based on other free software. But modern copyright law
doesn't grant us what we need to preserve our computing heritage in the
most useful way.
