Wally
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- 19 Ιαν 2006
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Πολυ κριμα που στην αρκετα δυσαρεστη στασιμοτητα, προστεθηκαν και εμπορικες αξιωσεις απο μελος της ομαδας...So..
There is now one member of the official Mame Team who expects to be paid for his work on MAME.
Heʼs already stated that heʼs received 60$ for 2 hours work in ʽfixingʼ MAMEUI code, saying that he wonʼt work on such code without being paid.
This IMHO sets an awful precedent. Once one person starts expecting to be paid others will follow. This is what I mean by developers being involved who are involved entirely for personal benefit, and not that of the project.
Iʼve spent 16+ hours this week trying to figure out Decathlete, without hacks. I might not have anything to show for it in the end either. Should I start asking for 500$ to cover my time too?
MAME has always been about the community, doing things because you want to do them, doing them for free, doing them to benefit everybody, not to benefit yourself financially or otherwise. In 10+ years Iʼve asked for, and received a total of 0$ for my work on this project. Thatʼs how it should be.
Yes, family comes first, work comes first, thatʼs reasonable, and understandable, but if you choose to work on MAME instead of doing actual work, you shouldnʼt expect payment for it. The whole ethos about MAME has always been that itʼs a ʽfreeʼ project, hence the ʽno commercial useʼ clause of the license which has existed from day one.
Extending this ʽpayment for codingʼ further would be even worse for the project than anything else. Money wouldnʼt be going towards rare boards, but instead coders, and people would start coming up with whatever solutions got them paid, rather than the CORRECT solutions which are far more important to MAME. Itʼs easy to apply a few hacks to fix a bug, the likes of MASH and MameSick have showed this over the years, but real fixes require proper understanding and when the motivating factor becomes cash, not understanding itʼs much more likely youʼll see rushed fixes, which in the long run will only damage the project.
Itʼs also only going to cause conflicts, not only due to the inequality of it all, but arguments over the validity of the solutions. Keep in mind that EVERYTHING in MAME is built on the back of work done by somebody else. If I say I want payment of 500$ to emulate the Cave SH3 shooters, would that be fair? Most of the work has been done for me, just needs some mods to the SH4 core, and the driver writing, hardly fair on the people who slaved over writing that in the first place. Likewise, sound, right now Iʼm sure the people making discoveries about it will be quite happy to share, but if they know Iʼm going to make money out of using their work, their findings, and give none of it to them that situation could quite easily change.
Then thereʼs the legal side. If I start accepting payment for things itʼs going to raise a few more eyebrows. Using the previous example, it might make the said company more likely to consider a lawsuit, somebody else is profiting out of their work. If MAME becomes a machine to make money for the developers it becomes a much more viable target, many of the filesharing site cases have had a focus on the amount of money being made out of them. Great efforts have already been made to make clear the separation between the people working with cash (buying boards and dumping them) and the people working on the actual emulator because thatʼs one area in which a clear separation is beneficial to everybody.
Itʼs just a ridiculous situation, and it doesnʼt surprise me one bit that the person trying to pioneer it is one of the very same people who was pivotal in having me removed from the project. You can cut divide the people doing this because they care, and the people doing it for their own benefit and egos clear as a knife through butter. IMHO there should be a 0 tolerance policy on such things (just as I took a 0 tolerance policy on anybody found to be involved in selling MAME CDs etc.).
Iʼve tried to push for real progress in previous posts, but instead, weʼre seeing this kind of thing. If you thought credit-wars were bad youʼve seen nothing yet if this becomes the norm. The no commercial use clause should also apply to people trying to charge money to develop MAME, even if they thinly veil it in a ʽdonationsʼ system.
/rant
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