Hello,

I first created a mud Age of Darkness (AoD), and did a lot of the coding changes on it. After sometime, I hired a few coders and made them co-owners, now when I went to vacation and came back, they changed the shell pw and everything, so I contacted the shell provider. The shell provider decided to give us both a copy of the code, and delete the shell. These so called co-owners put up the mud somewhere else as the mud name "Seventh Seal"...They put up their own copyright on the greeting "SS © 2004-2005 Corlan Stoic Jaromir", and they deleted AoD (Age of Darkness) credits of mine from everywhere...I have been reminding them for the past week or so to putup credit for the coding that I did on the codebase..and they still have not..I tried a last resort to logon their mud and wrote a note..and was frozen right after I wrote it..what should I do?


-Vector

Nevermind all, they finally put the credits up, glad to see that.

This right here is the reason no one touches my code, however if they were to in any form I would utilize CVS, which gives them enough to work in the shell without giving up the real shell password.  If you are head coder as well as owner, you could even configure it so they can check out and modify files(library-style) and not commit the final changes, but submit them for you to.  CVS comes highly recommended by me if you want to have multiple coders in any form so they can all see what the other did without them having to write notes, or search for /* NEW CODE 05/07/04 */  - it'll all be itemized in detailed easy to read reports that are foolproof to interpret.

As for your shell provider giving them a copy of the code, that is completely bogus - If you are the owner of the shell, per the info you provided when you purchased it, you are sole owner of all works done on it(if you have that in your IMOTD info, that way you can re-work, modify, hack the code currently there, give it away, share it,  and/or tweak/improve upon it without any liability in that respect.

Zaroth-

Untrue. Copyright assignment is distinct from the media upon which the work was created.