Licensing of mameinfo.dat

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi!

I am part of the team that is working in bringing MAME to Debian and
Ubuntu, along with the best supporting tools and frontends.

While the most difficult part of the work (packaging, uploading and
getting MAME accepted in the official Debian archive) is done, we're now
trying to finish off the details.

I'd like to add mameinfo.dat to a mame-data package, but for this we would
need it to have some kind of licence statement.

I've seen that history.dat is licenced under a Creative Commons 3.0
release. I suggest you do the same, and suggest the Attribution-ShareAlike
variant:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Once the file has such a licence statement in its header, we'll be happy
to distribute it in official Debian and Ubuntu packages!

Thanks,
Jordi
--
Jordi Mallach P�rez -- Debian developer http://www.debian.org/
jo...@sindominio.net jo...@debian.org http://www.sindominio.net/
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[Jordi Mallach]

Hi!

On Sat, Apr 02, 2011 at 12:47:31AM +0100, MASH wrote:
> thanks for mailing! I give you the permission to add the
> MAMEinfo.dat to your
> Debian and Ubuntu mame-data package.
> But any licence statement thingy will i not add to the MAMEinfo header
> for now and in the future. Nope!

Can I ask why? Adding a license does not restrict the use or your control
over the file any more than you like. I proposed an open license, which
other MAME data authors have accepted, but you could very well chose
another more restrictive, that still lets us redistribute and use this
data.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but having no license, according to
copyright law, equals to granting no rights at all, not even for personal
use. The correct thing is to make this explicit, and it can be very
formal, with a "professional" license, or just a quick statement like:

"You are free to do whatever you want with this file."

See, for example, this license. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

I hope you will reconsider.

> Also, you do not need to add the extra files from the Mameinfo0141u4.zip:
> Doc.Mameinfo.txt
> Hardware.txt
> Newsletter.txt

Ok, thanks.