David Haywood＇s MAME(tm) WIP - The continuing decline… (2011/06/02)

The continuing decline…

So..

There is now one member of the official Mame Team who expects to be paid for his work on MAME.

He’s already stated that he’s received 60$ for 2 hours work in ‘fixing’ MAMEUI code, saying that he won’t 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.

I’ve 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 I’ve asked for, and received a total of 0$ for my work on this project. That’s how it should be.

Yes, family comes first, work comes first, that’s reasonable, and understandable, but if you choose to work on MAME instead of doing actual work, you shouldn’t expect payment for it. The whole ethos about MAME has always been that it’s a ‘free’ project, hence the ‘no commercial use’ clause of the license which has existed from day one.

Extending this ‘payment for coding’ further would be even worse for the project than anything else. Money wouldn’t 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. It’s 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 it’s much more likely you’ll see rushed fixes, which in the long run will only damage the project.

It’s 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 I’m sure the people making discoveries about it will be quite happy to share, but if they know I’m 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 there’s the legal side. If I start accepting payment for things it’s 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 that’s one area in which a clear separation is beneficial to everybody.

It’s just a ridiculous situation, and it doesn’t 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.).

I’ve tried to push for real progress in previous posts, but instead, we’re seeing this kind of thing. If you thought credit-wars were bad you’ve 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 ‘donations’ system.

/rant


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