Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - Some direct questions for Synozeer and Medievia

Sinuhe · 06-07-2005, 05:25 AM

Traithe wrote: June 06 2005,19:43
Well said, Traithe.

A large number of free muds are traditionally founded, partly or completely, on ‘fan fiction’. This has traditionally been accepted in the Mud community, whereas plagiarism, stealing of code and areas and removing of credits always have been shunned by the same community.

The difference should be obvious to anyone. ‘Fan fiction’ honours and reveres it roots. The reason the mud was started or the area created in the first place is that the creator was so taken with the book or movie that he wants to share his enthusiasm with a greater audience.

They use the original names and settings as a spin-off, and create new material inspired by it. They never try to hide the origin of their inspiration. On the contrary, they try very hard to advertise it, to get more supporters for their favourite author, and more readers for his or her books. The copyright holders are most likely aware of this fact, which could be one reason why they hardly ever respond to direct requests to use their material as theme for a mud. They don’t really mind the free advertising they get. But on the other hand they don’t want to sanction it officially, in case that would set an unwanted precedence, if they some time in the future wanted to allow some commercial game to be based on their work. (This is of course just a personal theory of mine, but a rather plausible one. Why else would they not say plain ‘NO, you are not allowed to do that, and if you do we will sue you for copyright infringement’ when asked directly by a Mud owner?)

A typical fan-fiction mud or area always gives credit to its roots, perhaps worded something like this:

‘This zone/area was inspired by the awesome Lord of the Rings Trilogy by Tolkien. If you are not yet familiar with these wonderful books, you should go and purchase them and read them now. Hopefully this game will inspire you to do so, and in this way give something back to the original that has inspired us to create this mud.’

A code stealer on the other hand does everything to hide the connections to the original that he stole. The first action is of course to remove the credits and copyrights statement, and replace them with his own name. The next task is to go through the code systematically, primarily to change as many of the openly displayed messages as possible, but also to remove all hidden references to the original code, in case someone got hold of their source code. This of course takes a lot of time and effort to do, at the expense of actually developing any new and original additional code. Since the code has so many lines, they sometimes slip up, and leave something incriminating in there by mistake. This is what happened with the amusing references to Tinymuds and its creators that KaVir and the other viewers found when going through the Medievia code.

But this was long ago. By now, over 10 years later, Vryce has had ample time to finish this work, and make sure that there are no lasting references to the code he stole. This is when he proudly announces that Medievia is now ‘totally rewritten’ and ‘100 % original’. Sure, he added a lot of new code too, but however much he adds that never changes the fact that the code still is and always will be a Diku derivative.

And here comes the ultimate insult. Not only does he remove the credits, he also insults the origin in the official history of Medievia, that Soleil so obligingly linked to. Here is how they show their reverence to the code they stole and based on:

‘Medievia is not a DIKU mud. We got our feet wet 12 years ago with a Merc beta release in 1991. That was 26,000 lines of programming, Medievia V is over 450,000 lines of programming. DIKU mud did not work when you used it as it was full of memory leaks, poor design and an architecture that would never scale up to what we needed. DIKU was basically ABER mud re-tooled. Merc then took DIKU code and re-tooled it again.’

... And then Vryce took Merc code and re-tooled it again ...

No wonder Soleil and Vryce will never get any respect on Mudlab, or for that matter from any decent mud developers.
It's like Tony Soprano buying a large house in an respectable neighbourhood and expecting to be regarded as an equal of his neighbours, who all know what his fortune was founded on.

06-07-2005, 05:25 AM	#100
Sinuhe Member Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 55	Traithe wrote: June 06 2005,19:43 Well said, Traithe. A large number of free muds are traditionally founded, partly or completely, on ‘fan fiction’. This has traditionally been accepted in the Mud community, whereas plagiarism, stealing of code and areas and removing of credits always have been shunned by the same community. The difference should be obvious to anyone. ‘Fan fiction’ honours and reveres it roots. The reason the mud was started or the area created in the first place is that the creator was so taken with the book or movie that he wants to share his enthusiasm with a greater audience. They use the original names and settings as a spin-off, and create new material inspired by it. They never try to hide the origin of their inspiration. On the contrary, they try very hard to advertise it, to get more supporters for their favourite author, and more readers for his or her books. The copyright holders are most likely aware of this fact, which could be one reason why they hardly ever respond to direct requests to use their material as theme for a mud. They don’t really mind the free advertising they get. But on the other hand they don’t want to sanction it officially, in case that would set an unwanted precedence, if they some time in the future wanted to allow some commercial game to be based on their work. (This is of course just a personal theory of mine, but a rather plausible one. Why else would they not say plain ‘NO, you are not allowed to do that, and if you do we will sue you for copyright infringement’ when asked directly by a Mud owner?) A typical fan-fiction mud or area always gives credit to its roots, perhaps worded something like this: ‘This zone/area was inspired by the awesome Lord of the Rings Trilogy by Tolkien. If you are not yet familiar with these wonderful books, you should go and purchase them and read them now. Hopefully this game will inspire you to do so, and in this way give something back to the original that has inspired us to create this mud.’ A code stealer on the other hand does everything to hide the connections to the original that he stole. The first action is of course to remove the credits and copyrights statement, and replace them with his own name. The next task is to go through the code systematically, primarily to change as many of the openly displayed messages as possible, but also to remove all hidden references to the original code, in case someone got hold of their source code. This of course takes a lot of time and effort to do, at the expense of actually developing any new and original additional code. Since the code has so many lines, they sometimes slip up, and leave something incriminating in there by mistake. This is what happened with the amusing references to Tinymuds and its creators that KaVir and the other viewers found when going through the Medievia code. But this was long ago. By now, over 10 years later, Vryce has had ample time to finish this work, and make sure that there are no lasting references to the code he stole. This is when he proudly announces that Medievia is now ‘totally rewritten’ and ‘100 % original’. Sure, he added a lot of new code too, but however much he adds that never changes the fact that the code still is and always will be a Diku derivative. And here comes the ultimate insult. Not only does he remove the credits, he also insults the origin in the official history of Medievia, that Soleil so obligingly linked to. Here is how they show their reverence to the code they stole and based on: ‘Medievia is not a DIKU mud. We got our feet wet 12 years ago with a Merc beta release in 1991. That was 26,000 lines of programming, Medievia V is over 450,000 lines of programming. DIKU mud did not work when you used it as it was full of memory leaks, poor design and an architecture that would never scale up to what we needed. DIKU was basically ABER mud re-tooled. Merc then took DIKU code and re-tooled it again.’ ... And then Vryce took Merc code and re-tooled it again ... No wonder Soleil and Vryce will never get any respect on Mudlab, or for that matter from any decent mud developers. It's like Tony Soprano buying a large house in an respectable neighbourhood and expecting to be regarded as an equal of his neighbours, who all know what his fortune was founded on.