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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 GPL3GPLv3) 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]].

Sometimes developers choose not to release the entire source code for their projects, and instead only allow public access to ''some'' of the source code while keeping ''other'' parts closed-sourceto partially be made public. Usually, the core functionality of the program is what becomes sourcegets released under compatible licensing terms (at best, a non-available copyleft FLOSS license) while certain bells and whistles remain proprietaryclosed-source, hence the term "open core". This While there's some debate as to whether the stripped-down, fully source-available versions of these programs could count as FLOSS, the model as a whole is pretty rare for emulation software; one notable example undoubtedly not fully in keeping with the broader software world is seen with [https://about.gitlab.com/ ideals of the GitLab project]open-source movement, where the GitLab developers offer and it's often considered a paid Enterprise Edition with some additional business-focused features compared compromise model that allows outside contributions and/or code reuse while still making it viable to sell the freely available core code in the Community Editionsoftware for profit.

While there's some debate as to whether the stripped-down, fully source-available versions of these programs could count as FLOSS, the This model as a whole is undoubtedly pretty rare for emulation software, and not fully actually that common in keeping with the ideals broader software world either; one of the open-source movementmost notable examples is [https://about.gitlab.com/ GitLab], and it's often considered whose developers offer a compromise model that allows outside contributions and/or paid Enterprise Edition with some additional business-focused features compared to the freely available core code reuse while still making it viable to sell in the software for profitCommunity Edition.