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               mspacman        Ms. 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.