as long as there are idiots willing to pay there will be scum of the earth taking advantage of that.
Mame has always been free, but still today you can find people and places selling it.
The bad thing about these 'lib' type projects (IMHO) is they make it far easier to hide what the emulator is to an unsuspecting buyer, and thus far easier to sell / get repeat sales because people don't realise they can get the same emulator for free. They often end up stripping the brand identity, which is what the sellers want to do in the first place.
I agree with you that dynamically loadable libraries somewhat muddy things from a legal perspective in that it could create the illusion that just because the frontend (RetroArch Android) is GPL, that it's therefore fine to go ahead and sell that with a libretro core which incorporates an emulator that uses a proprietary commercial license.
However, in this case, it's pretty clear which license applies - it's of the libretro core itself in this case - FBA. Also, I feel it is wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that everything that depends on relocatable code therefore creates extra complications and that therefore projects like libretro are undesirable for deveopers to support - hell, if we apply that thinking to its logical conclusion, Android and the way it loads C/C++ "dynamic libraries" would have to go in the first place. JNI is a big fat hack on top of Java that already works like that and which is how every single Android app runs C/C++ code to begin with - so there's no avoiding this in the first place. It just so happened that we already started doing this for libretro/RetroArch before we even started thinking of doing an Android port.
The thing is - no sane person in their right mind is going to keep buying this stuff when they can have something like RetroArch Android with ten or twenty times the cores it has for absolutely free. I have been quite outspoken about wanting to remedy the lousy situation on app stores with regards to this kind of morally questionable behavior and I have had some great success so far in stemming the tide of these things and dissuading users from buying these things. So there has been a backlash against these payware 'rebranded emu ports' growing in large part due to RetroArch Android.
In case my intentions are not clear, they are laid bare here -
http://www.libretro.com/pages/menubar/mission.htmlSo in the end, unless they are going to add features that users really want to see (and thus put some effort into it - something that has yet to happen really with these guys), they are really fighting a losing battle here. Yes, these spinoffs will pop up, but it's quite easy to file takedown requests with Google when the project in question happens to use a non-commercial proprietary license. In the end, I doubt there is much they can do at this point to keep being competitive to RetroArch - the project keeps growing at an exponential rate, keeps adding new cores, and I feel like most of these guys in it just for the money are not going to really have the time, energy or dedication to fight that. Robert Broglia hasn't released a new payware emu port for a good few 5 months now or more, others don't seem to have done much anymore and so the initial honeymoon period for these guys is coming to an end.
Also - I went to some lengths to emphasise this for the RetroArch Android release - I don't know if it could be made legally binding, but then again none of these non-commercial licenses have ever been tried in court either - so it's all up in the air to begin with:
While RetroArch might be licensed under the GPL, the emulators themselves might have a 'non-commercial' license or any other proprietary license that forbids selling (such as FBA and Genesis Plus GX). YOU ARE THEREFORE COMPELLED TO OBEY BY THE SPECIFIC LICENSE DEMANDS IMPOSED BY THE EMULATOR CONTAINED IN THIS PACK IF YOU HAVE ANY INTENTION OF 'REUSING' ANY OF THE SPECIFIC CORES CONTAINED IN THIS PACKAGE. YOU COMPLY WITH EACH LICENSE ON A PER-CORE BASIS.
I got some flak over this by some FLOSS guy who said this "limited his freedom" - whatever that means. But his main point of contention seemed to be "I want FBA and Genesis Plus GX removed because this package does not allow me to resell them and because they are bound by 'non-free' licenses". The FLOSS crowd these days is more concerned about petty ripoff artists' ability to rip people off and charge money for stuff they didn't write themselves rather than protecting authors from this kind of app store abuse it seems.
