I have always offered cooperation with MAME, we have always offered the upstream MAME core to them.

I repeat, I believe MAME overall is a good project and it definitely should succeed as a Rosetta Stone-type project for hardware preservation. I do not believe Libretro/RetroArch have to be at odds with each other. We can help build each other up as fellow opensource projects.

What we cannot do, however, is remove older MAME cores. That would be inconveniencing endusers and frankly, it serves nobody. Arcade 1 Up is not going to stop using pre-0.172 MAME forks just because we don't offer MAME 2003 or MAME 2010. iMAME4all and Mame4droid Reloaded don't cease to magically exist. The Raspberry Pi community will just continue using the oldest snapshot of the core source and just fork it instead.

Really, where did things arrive at that we try to control and police what happens with open source code? Once it's out, it's out - that is the beauty and the double edged sword of open source that gives it its revolutionary aspect. You can't put that genie back in the bottle.

The most effective solution for making sure that everything gets done according to one's personal dictates? Closed sourcing. That much is undeniable. However, I thought we all agreed on the fact that the reason we have these projects as open source is because we believe in the ideological component of it. Freedom is a respecter of no persons then, and you have to be willing to accept that things will be done with it that you don't necessarily agree with.