GGPO: Closed source will violate many emulator licenses

[Frogacuda]

It's great to see another attempt being made at a netplay dll to be integrated into emulators, but have we learned nothing from Kaillera? Kaillera is effectively contraband in all but a few open-source emulators because the closed-source nature makes it a violation of the General Public License. This is why MAME ports that use Kaillera are illegal and not well supported. It seems like a mistake to go down this road again if this is just a non-profit venture.

Will we see open source when the project is done?

[Cardinal_Sin]

because the closed-source nature makes it a violation of the General Public License.

um your title and this quote make no sense

there's only one major license with the words "general public license" in it (gnu) and mame isn't even gnu gpl

edit: that having been said final burn is freeware so there's no licensing problem there either

edit2: thank you the title makes sense now

[Frogacuda]

Freeware has nothing to do with license. MAME is freeware, but including Kaillera is still a violation of the MAME license.

* Redistributions that are modified from the original source must include the
complete source code, including the source code for all components used by a
binary built from the modified sources. However, as a special exception, the
source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed
(in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel,
and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that
component itself accompanies the executable.

Final Burn has no license agreement specified though, so it is fair game. It's also kind of obsolete and crappy and it would be nice if this great project could be used in MAME or newer emus.

[Ponder]

It's great to see another attempt being made at a netplay dll to be integrated into emulators, but have we learned nothing from Kaillera? Kaillera is effectively contraband in all but a few open-source emulators because the closed-source nature makes it a violation of the General Public License. This is why MAME ports that use Kaillera are illegal and not well supported. It seems like a mistake to go down this road again if this is just a non-profit venture.

Will we see open source when the project is done?

This is a really good question. I honestly know nothing about the history of Kaillera or what its relationship with the MAME people are (feel free to enlighten me!). There are upsides and downsides to going either way.

If ggpo.net ever going to support more than just a few CPS2 games I'm going to have to switch emulators. MAME is the obvious choice, and if I do integrate into MAME it would be done in a method compatible with the spirit of the MAME license (i.e. none of this binary loading business).

One problem I see with releasing the source too early is that it may have a splintering affect on the community, diluting the really good network affects you get from having more and more people playing on a single service. There's also my admittedly selfish desire to have 100% control of how this thing evolves in the short term: I've put 2 years into this so far and am not really excited to open everything up immediately.

I couldn't even have gotten off the ground if the license to Final Burn were not so permissive (using MAME and Final Burn Alpha were non-starters due to their licensing restrictions). Since I'm basically standing on Dave's shoulders here, my inclination is that eventually the should should be made open in some form (BSD or GPL or something).

However we're still very early here (it's only been 3 days since the first public release). My thoughts on this matter could change in either way as the situation evolves, but that's my thinking to this point.

[Cardinal_Sin]

Freeware has nothing to do with license. MAME is freeware, but including Kaillera is still a violation of the MAME license.


Fair enough, that was a misnomer on my part, what I meant to say was that there wasn't any licensing issue to deal with in the first place at least in terms of FB (as opposed to FB alpha which does have a GNU-style license).

Minor correction though: the official mame32k build does offer the full kaillera source from what I understand.

A suggestion might be that GGPO could release its API so that someone interested enough might be willing to integrate their emulator with it without having access to the actual algorithms (which I assume are the most valuable parts the GGPO team is interested in safeguarding), but unfortunately that probably wouldn't discourage other people from hooking into the API with illegal mame builds anyways.

edit: nvm, from what above post indicates, releasing an API would probably relinquish way too much control of where ggpo would be headed at the moment.

[0746]

Minor correction though: the official mame32k build does offer the full kaillera source from what I understand.
Actually it doesn't. Thats one of the thins wrong with kaillera....officials wont fix it and its not open source.

[SweetJohnnyV]

From my own selfish personal perspective, it'd be cool if your stuff went open source. But honestly, if you've spent two years on this, are you sure you don't want to keep it closed and look into productizing it? It seems like you could license this lib to game companies.

[The Grey Ghost]

What about Kawaks? It was designed with 2D fighters in mind...

[Frogacuda]

This is a really good question. I honestly know nothing about the history of Kaillera or what its relationship with the MAME people are (feel free to enlighten me!). There are upsides and downsides to going either way.

MAME's relationship with Kaillera is strained. If you talk about it on the MAME boards, you'll have your posts edited, and linking to any build that uses it is a strict no-no. These ports are unsupported, illegal, and considered contraband. However, I don't really know how aggressively MAME polices violations of license. I know a couple korean and japanese ports that use Kaillera.

One problem I see with releasing the source too early is that it may have a splintering affect on the community, diluting the really good network affects you get from having more and more people playing on a single service. There's also my admittedly selfish desire to have 100% control of how this thing evolves in the short term: I've put 2 years into this so far and am not really excited to open everything up immediately.Yeah, I can understand that worry, but I think the amount of splintering is going to be limited. I don't think someone playing on MAME will be able to play someone on Final Burn anyway, so there's some splintering, but generally, people will probably use the official version supported by that particular emulator.

Some emulator authors might customize it a bit to suit their implimentation, but I can only imagine that being a good thing.

But yeah, waiting until it's very solid to open it might be smart. But I hope to see it opened up eventually because the emulation community could really benefit from something like that.

[Kazoo]

I wonder if it's an omen that somehow, I was magically finally able to register here when this popped up.

I already have my fingers crossed that GGPO goes open, hopefully not to support just MAME alone, but rather an emulator built and optimized for fighting games. Sure, there are games other than fighters that could benefit from what GGPO provides, but (as if I need to say this) this is clearly being developed with the fighting game community in mind and we should come first. MAME continues to require an increasingly beefy PC to play games, and even on my gaming-quality rig, something like the CPS3 games suffer terribly.

There's also a hurdle to jump about if there are any existing projects that play so many different games that MAME does (what else has support for Tekken and SFA3 together?), but ultimately, it would seem best to try and extend the reach of such a project to as many people as possible, especially the average fighting game fan, who from what I have observed doesn't often seem to be a big PC gamer as well.

[arstal]

I really think for this to be popular, you're going to have to go to MAME. Control's important, but can always be set by limiting the builds that work on the server. I don't think a splintering effect has to be worried too much about. Between the release of Mame 0.64 and last week- people used .64 Only 3s has caused people to update MAME. The only other games I can see causing an update once 3s is 100% would be MvC2, KOF XI or a PS2 em.

[thrazz]

Without knowing about potential license problemas, WinKawaks is the best emulator for fighting games imho.

[Kazoo]

The controls in Kawaks just aren't as tight as they should be, I find. I also notice, having used both it and MAME extensively through Kaillera, that Kawaks has a much harder time staying synchronized - I suspect that's probably some issue with the way the two programs handle processes and inputs, and wonder how that might effect GGPO.

I'm also not too fond of Kawaks' interface in netplay, though I suppose that's merely a personal gripe.

[vapulus]

One problem I see with releasing the source too early is that it may have a splintering affect on the community, diluting the really good network affects you get from having more and more people playing on a single service. There's also my admittedly selfish desire to have 100% control of how this thing evolves in the short term: I've put 2 years into this so far and am not really excited to open everything up immediately.

This is the biggest thing I see here. Ponder, I commend you on your excellent work so far, and you're basically at the coding frontier for fighting game networking. I don't want to see the source spread out, dilluted, and turned into a free-for-all in a bunch of shoddy attempts. Obviously, I agree with how you're doing things so far. Take your time, do things on your own terms. I've been affected by a video game licensing issue before, and it sucked. Don't worry about that bridge until it's time to cross it.

[laugh]

Am I the only one who thinks FBA >>> Kawaks?

[The Grey Ghost]

Am I the only one who thinks FBA >>> Kawaks?
GGPO is my first exposure to Final Burn... From what I can see, the sound is painfully choppy and you have two video options: Scanlines and Blurry Eyesore.

Kawaks is very simple to set up (compared to MAME, at least), looks good, sounds good, and feels good.

[KING]

Am I the only one who thinks FBA >>> Kawaks?
yes Chang, you're the only one. :)


Kawaks > FB

[Dandy J]

There is a version of finalburn alpha that can save online recordings by state (aka you can stop and start anytime) via hotkey and it auto-names them. For that it kills kawaks.

GGPO is my first exposure to Final Burn... From what I can see, the sound is painfully choppy and you have two video options: Scanlines and Blurry Eyesore.

Kawaks is very simple to set up (compared to MAME, at least), looks good, sounds good, and feels good.
Final Burn != Final Burn Alpha

Kawaks and FBA are basically the same emu.

[RockCho]

Erm... forget what I posted. It had nothing to do with the OP.

[Kingbuzzo]

I'd like to see some multiplatform support for sure since many prefer to use linux for their emu setup. IMO, kaillera really missed the boat when they never made a port to linux and stayed closed-source till the bitter end.

Mame is a good emu, but SDLMame is showing good promise too.

But since most mame builds are so beefy, how about taking a look at Raine and Gngero?

[0746]

Think we're forgetting the part that Kawaks is not open source and I doubt that the guys maintaining it at cps2shock will just make it open source...dunno...talking to them might be an option.