Is MAME Open Source?: Difference between revisions

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[http://mamedev.org/legal.html MAME's License] is a modified version of the standard BSD license. The primary modification is that we do not allow commercial distribution or use of MAME, in order to limit some of the obvious abuses of the code. Because of this modification, MAME's license does not fall under the definition of an '''O'''pen '''S'''ource (uppercase) license. This is one of the reasons you don't see the MAME source code hosted on sites such as [http://sourceforge.net SourceForge].
[http://mamedev.org/legal.html MAME's Source Code] is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license!  As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. This license change is in present for all sources as of [https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/35ccf865 Git revision 35ccf865] with the first public upcoming release of MAME 0.172.  Source files may also be licensed as specified in the file header and the license change does not apply to prior versions of MAME to this version/git revision.
 
Confusingly, MAME is often referred to as '''o'''pen '''s'''ource (lowercase), as its development shares much in common with other open source projects. However, in spite of its freely available source code, MAME may not be used in a commercial setting, as specified by its license.


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Revision as of 01:05, 5 March 2016

MAME's Source Code is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. This license change is in present for all sources as of Git revision 35ccf865 with the first public upcoming release of MAME 0.172. Source files may also be licensed as specified in the file header and the license change does not apply to prior versions of MAME to this version/git revision.

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