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OK, let's sum up again: the word of the license says you can't make *ANY* profit.
Whichever way you interpret profit, this means you can't exchange donations for in-game benefits. How hard is that? That's the letter of the thing.
Then there's the spirit of the thing, which, depending on the legal system, may or may not be considered: the andlo-american judicial practice actually puts more stock in this than continental European court. Regardless, there's also no intperpretation of that same sentence in terms of spirit which allows you to exchange cash for in-game benefits.
In the worst case, there's no meeting of minds required by any contract, which comes back to the fact that you can't even use DIKU at all.
Aside from that, ignoring ethics and morals in a legal discussion might be your take on it, yet ethics and morals tend to be one _huge_ factor in legal considerations, whether we're talking about legislation itself or judicial activity.
I'm sure you've heard the term "good faith basis", right? This one actually plays a huge role in interpreting laws and contracts, and if "good faith basis" isn't a term heavily influenced by ethics, I don't know what is.
Glad to entertain you.
Which comes back to saying "don't exchange donations for in-game benefits or don't use it altogether".
The step in-between, though, all paranoid considerations aside, could be as simple as "Hrm... I have this MUD running now, which is heavily modded. I want to go commercial. If I recode from scratch, I also need to recode everything I changed in DIKUrative..." From there it could be either the who cares, I'll just pretend I changed everything (Med) or What the heck, I'll take donations now to finance my recoding efforts.
This is quite obviously where we're not ready to agree (see explanations above), as I don't think there's any wiggling room despite the poor wording.
Agreed, assuming everyone argues in good faith. Which I have a hard time to believe from certain posters here, due, among other things, to past posting history.
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