Quoted from SadSack:In fact, the defense here seems to be:
"Nucore is a derivative work and as such is required to be released under the license from which it was derived. Therefore, BGP cannot suffer damages at the hand of defendant for simply enforcing the license implied by Nucore's use of the OSS from which it was derived.
But that's the thing. Depending on how you interpret the GNU license, you don't need to release everything. For instance, this:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works."
Unless I'm wrong, and I've worked under these sorts of agreements in the past, the QEMU release would have been it's own thing, and NuCore would be considered an independent and separate work. Again, how I interpret this, the GNU agreement is speaking of the core code. I don't have a NuCore set, but from what I can tell, the thing that they should have been doing (and for all I know, may have been doing) is state that the work was done on the QEMU platform and provide a copy of the source code for the version they used. Because the running of a pinball machine is pretty far outside of the scope of what QEMU was built for, you could reasonably state that this was done as an independent work in itself for the sections that were added to it.
Now, again, I'm no lawyer and I'm lucky in that I have worked with the person that created the GNU open source part of the projects I have done, but from what I understand this is a totally reasonable answer to the whole thing.
Regardless, deciding that you're a vigilante isn't really a very good legal argument.
Quoted from Joe_Blasi:Well the rights owns to WMS pinball are makeing money off of that? why this should be free and the rights owns should have no say about what you use to get your HARDWARE working.
You can fix your HARDWARE without NuCore, so this is a moot point. If this was the way that Williams released it, and then they refused to give it out, sell it, or anything else and when systems broke, it just needed this software to boot, then I think I'd feel differently, as Williams would be legally stopping you from repairing your machine. But they aren't. Your HARDWARE can be repaired without NuCore completely legally.