Thread: Aardwolf?
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Old 03-28-2006, 04:51 PM   #13
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
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In the case of your codebase the licence may well be a contract, but the same is not necessarily true for Diku:



"A software licence is not necessarily a contract. It can be, but that requires a couple of preconditions to be satisfied. One of those preconditions is the existence of consideration on both sides. Consideration is a legal concept that simply means a quid-pro-quo, or something of value given by each party in exchange for what the other party provides. In the case of open source software, there usually isn't anything provided by the licensee of the software (that is, the person who uses it) back to the licensor (usually, the person who wrote it). As a consequence of this lack of consideration there is no contract between the licensee and licensor."

However those muds are still Diku derivatives, and are bound by the same licence.

And you can sell areas you produce on a DikuMUD.  But you cannot sell your Diku derivative, any more than you could reverse engineer, modify and sell MS Word.

And the wording in that regard is certainly one of the main points of contention, as I mentioned earlier, and probably one of the reasons why Aardwolf doesn't get as much negative attention as Medievia.  I think you'll agree that the law is pretty clear about removing copyright notices, and that the licence is fairly clear in regard to credit notices?
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