First, why didn't I include Daedalus, PJ64, 1964, SNES 9x, VirtuaNES etc. in my list. Well, my list was just an example.
The above emus are all good emulators, but the license of PJ64 and SNES 9x is horrible. Let me quote the "Free Software Project Management HOWTO" (found on linuxdoc.org and many other places if you are interested):
"Many people write three or four sentences in a COPYING file and assume that they have written a free software license--as my long experience with the debian-legal mailing professes, this is very often not the case. It may not protect you, it may not protect your software, and it may make things very difficult for people that want to use your software but who pay a lot of attention to the subtle legal points of licenses."
If you don't understand what is the difference having a usual freeware program and a program licensed with an open source license, take a look at the Open Source Definition at:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Now, many of you say that it is good that projects that have stopped usually release their source code. This is true, but how much better it would be to have the source code right from the start? Think about it. It took many years to finally get the source code for ZSNES, and when we got it, it didn't take many weeks until we had a fully functional Linux port of ZSNES.
The same would have actually been done for PJ64, since we now have its source. But there's one big problem: PJ64's source is quite useless since
a) it doesn't include the source for the plugins
b) it has its own weird license as described above (well, not weird, but it is very problematic to use PJ64's code in, say, a GPL application since I'm quite sure that PJ64's license is not compatible with GPL, nor is it OSI certified (i.e. certified as a real open source license by OSI).
Currently, open source community is lacking a GBA emulator. Boycott Advance, Visual Boy Advance, and others, being closed source, are almost useless in most unices and you can only hope for a port for Mac or some more excotic platform. (If you know about Unix you know that binaries are almost worthless if you want to gain at least some level of compatability between different platforms). Now, having an open source GBA emu (say, that BoycottAdvance/SDL would be GPL'ed) would be the way to get GBA emulator ported on many platforms. Also, after that it would be easy (for beginners) to program new GBA emulator, just by taking a look at the sources, or using the sources directly.
Let me respond to this: "and saying that all closed source is buggy and all open source is not is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever read!!! Linux has bugs in it plus has the worstdriver surport i have ever seen."
Now, closed source is buggy, so is open source, as I said. But the bugs usually get corrected *much* faster in open source programs, and then, from the end-user point of view, the program works for him and he *does not have to wait for the author to release a bugfix for ages*. Well, if the author of the closed source program works hard, it might even be that the bugfixes are released very fast. But this is not always the case. Also, an end-user who knows some programming, could fix the bug by himself by looking at the source code.
And if you say that Linux has the worst driver support you have ever seen, you are probably right. But I'm typing this text on Mozilla running on a machine with Linux 2.4.0, XFree 4.0.2 and KDE2. All my periphral devices work, including the Epson printer. Now, I could buy, say, an exotic sound card that doesn't have drivers for Linux and then I could come here to blaim Linux for its bad driver support. The bottom line: Linux has enough drivers to support the most common devices and even more.
Now, I have to clear just one more thing up:
"the other thing with open source.. are trojans.." Did I get it right? This guy claims that trojans are a problem in open source. Hah. The trojans are a problem with closed source. You can as easily check the compiled open source program for viruces as you can check a closed source program. The point is that if you have the source, and know what it means, you can be sure that the program doesn't have trojans even without compiling it and checking it out with a virus scanner. With closed source programs, you just have to wonder "What if this contains a trojan and my scanner didn't notice it?". Trojans are a problem with closed source applications. Even some of the Microsoft's programs have them as we all know.
The conclusion:
------------------
It just happens that if we want new emulators, if we want them to be good and portable, if we want them to be free, and most of all, if we want everyone to be able to learn from them, the open source is the only choice. Everything else is just a waste of time. If you want to program for your own good, then do so, but if you want everyone to be able to get the most out of your program, then license them to open source. Share the information, share the fun; that's what open source is about, sharing. Too bad that sharing anything seems to be very hard for the human mind.