Is MAME Open Source?

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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 Open Source (uppercase) license. This is one of the reasons you don't see the MAME source code hosted on sites such as SourceForge.

Confusingly, MAME is often referred to as open source (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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