Sarapis
Try


or any of many similar links. The music community, in particular, seems to be aware of this issue.

To find more, one of the key search terms you're looking for is "joint work" copyright. Add things like license to narrow it down to the specific types of rights you're interested in.

Stilton

The question was what you have contributed to the mud community. Hiring someone to give up their current mud and work on a different one really makes little difference to anyone else.

Not bragging - simply pointing out that you claim "Your ignorance of successful mud development is astonishing, though that's not surprising" is unsupported by the facts.

Well obviously they couldn't stop you accepting donations through your website - the licence applies to DikuMUD, while the website (unless has Diku code or areas printed on it) falls outside the scope of the licence. This is also the view stated by the Diku team.

Well, there's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that I heard back from the Lexis rep a little earlier, and I'll be able to distribute all the cases, statutes, secondary source materials, etc. that I dig up along with my research findings. I'll probably just put the whole thing up on the SoI website and turn the legal case cites into links to the proper PDF files so you can read for yourself.

The bad news (sort of) is that I just found out my partner and I made it into the next round of the school's crimlaw moot court competition - which means my free time over spring break has just taken a considerable hit, due to the practice obligations. Plus, depending on how far we make it the competition lasts for most of March - so I may be pushing back the timetable on this thing by about a month or so.

Hopefully I'll still be able to scrape enough free time together before then to get this thing rolling, but we'll see how it goes.

In the interests of ending this pointless squabbling, I'll just leave it at this: A job and a hobby are not the same thing, nor do they contribute the same thing to a community. One feeds people, sends people's kids to college, pays mortgages, and so on. If you want to disagree with that, go ahead. It's not even worth a discussion. There's a reason rl communities care about job creation and not hobby creation, frankly.

Brings up an interesting question then: What if you charge just for stuff that's not part of DIKU. IE you don't charge for access or any abilities that's part of DIKU, but instead you charge for virtual items, for instance, which you create. Your creations are not part of DIKU, though they are derived from DIKU. I'm not a lawyer, obviously, and I suspect that issue's never really been dealt with before in courts in any other medium. Seems like it'd still be staying in bounds of the license though.

--matt

No squabbling, just a simple question of what you've contributed to the mud community. No need to be ashamed if the answer is "nothing" - a lot of people have contributed nothing. Of course such people don't usually throw stones in their glass houses.

If your mud is a Diku derivative, then it is bound by the Diku licence. If you moved your (completely original) creations to a different medium then you could charge for them; an entire scratch-written area written could be sold without any problems because it's an original work and (when not integrated with Diku) falls outside the scope of the Diku licence. But when integrated with Diku, the game and areas become a combined work, and therefore have to follow the Diku licence conditions

Take the as one of many examples - they allow you to use it for non-commercial purposes. You can use your code on a different compiler, or sell the source code, but you couldn't sell the executable.

This is also the same reason why the was created - to quote from their licence "The reason we have a separate public license for some libraries is that they blur the distinction we usually make between modifying or adding to a program and simply using it. Linking a program with a library, without changing the library, is in some sense simply using the library, and is analogous to running a utility program or application program. However, in a textual and legal sense, the linked executable is a combined work, a derivative of the original library, and the ordinary General Public License treats it as such."