Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 09:10:27 -0500
"J.B. Nicholson" <address@hidden> 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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