Jaleco, a Gameboy Advance cartridge vendor, released a vintage game-pack that included a public-domain NES emulator written by Loopy. They didn't credit him in the release, and a lot of hackers and gamers were affronted on Loopy's behalf, but Loopy doesn't care. As Waxy says, "his message embodies the spirit of the open-source movement":
Let someone take an idea, do something cool with it, and not have to hesitate because of legal nitpickings. If a company can take something that I made, and turn it into a product that other people enjoy, I'm all the happier for it. Why should I care if someone else profits off of something I made? It's already free.
Demanding that someone pay homage to my work is just ego-stroking, and I'm not into that. Sure, as a courtesy it would have been nice for Jaleco to tell me "hey, thanks for the source", and they didn't, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it, because I didn't write PocketNES so people would pat me on the back.
I wrote it so people could have fun playing old games. And that's exactly what's happening here. Mission accomplished.
I'm with him. After all, this guy used the holes in copyright to make an emulator that relied on Nintendo's (and its suppliers') IP.
(Thanks, Zed!)
