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→Non-commercial software
Despite this, non-commercial licenses have long been seen as a desirable or even essential option by some emulator developers, either to specifically pre-empt others from bundling their code into a proprietary payware package (even though this would also be a flagrant violation of copyleft licenses like the GPLv3) or using it in a pre-built [[Emulation Boxes|emulation box]] without their explicit permission, or because they simply haven't considered the possibility of any more legitimate commercial use cases for their projects. Or sometimes they do it out of caution that the original hardware manufacturer could take them to court, despite the fact that [[#Legality of emulation|the manufacturer's only grounds to stand on is whether the underlying technology behind a console is patented]].
Whatever reason the dev gives for a non-commercial clause in the software license, it ''should'' be of no consequence to the average end user who's just running wants a free emulator to play retro games on their PC for their own use. Some specific circumstances, such as a developer who's making a brand new commercial game for an old system and using an emulator to test it in lieu of real hardware, ''might'' be exceptions to this, but that's where it gets pretty murky from a legal standpoint.
However, ''developers'' of emulators must take extra precaution when working with code from a non-commercial emulator. As it is by definition not free software, the code is incompatible with the GPL, and the developer must take care not to mix GPL and non-commercial code. One example where this becomes relevant is with forks of old versions of MAME prior to its re-licensing to open-source. These forks can incorporate BSD code from the newest MAME versions, but are forbidden from including GPL MAME code. It has also been argued by some that RetroArch's ability to auto-download non-commercial cores is a license violation, as RetroArch is GPL-licensed and makes profit via Patreon.
