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Old 05-02-2006, 10:45 AM   #5
Valg
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Carrion Fields
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Valg will become famous soon enough
You should probably specify that you think the one clause dealing with profit is objectionable. I don't see how you could argue with stuff like "If you use our work, credit us thusly." I'm not sure what the DIKU team does for a living these days, but I'm confident that the credit they get from such a license makes their resume shine a little brighter.

Back to the broader point, I think you could argue that if DIKU didn't kick open the door when they did, text MUDs might not have taken off as a genre. As is, they're a niche market, and if they hadn't attracted so many innovators so rapidly, the genre might have missed its "window" and not gotten a foothold before the explosion of multiplayer graphical arcade-style games like Doom. I'm sure they would have still existed, but the MUD community would be a shadow of its current presence.

I think commercial interest is secondary to the innovation angle-- the community needed a working prototype before any buyers would have come along. It took a lot of sandbox work to show everyone what works and what doesn't, and there's no guarantee that a small number of commercial efforts would have outperformed the mass of noncommercial ones. It's also questionable that commercial entities would be interested in MUDs at all if it wasn't for the DIKU-aided explosion in overall MUD populations.
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