Changes

Some ostensibly "free and open-source" software licenses include, or can be modified to include, an extra provision that's designed to prevent the software from being used for any commercial purposes, e.g. the sale of software and/or hardware to turn a profit. Since this is a fairly explicit example of restricting who can use a piece of software and for what purpose, it does technically disqualify the software in question from being considered free and/or open-source, even if the developer still makes the source code is still readily available onlineto the public.

That being said, many some emulator developers intend for their projects to mostly be installed and used by fellow enthusiasts, on systems that they already own; the developers will therefore still choose to use see non-commercial licensingas a desirable or even essential option, either to specifically pre-empt others from repackaging bundling their code into commercial software a payware package (even though this would also be a flagrant violation of most FLOSS licenses) or using it in a pre-built [[Emulation Boxes|emulation boxesbox]] without their explicit permission, or because they simply haven't considered the possibility of any more legitimate commercial use cases for their projects. While Or sometimes they might just be scared of the original hardware owners coming after them and they see the non-commercial clause as an easy way to say, "hey, we're not trying to profit off of this, please don't sue us". 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 a free emulator on their PC for their own personal use shouldn't be affected by a non-commercial clause in the software license, arguments could still be made in . Some specific circumstances, such as a developer who's making a brand new commercial game for an old system and wants using an emulator to test the game it in an emulator because they donlieu of real hardware, ''might''t have access be exceptions to real hardwarethis, but that's where it admittedly gets pretty murky from a legal standpoint.