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Matt claims indeed to have an independent codebase. He's also the one who, after a rather, let's call it creative, reading of the DIKU license, was advertising services to have all dikurative MUD admins incorporate as LLCs so that they can cricumvent the "not make *ANY* profits* clause.
As I said, picture me paranoid, I just can't see what he's got to gain in all this. Full disclosure: I'm biased against Matt, and have been for a long time. Nothing he posted has ever changed my opinion, though - it only conforted me. And that's got nothing to do with Achea's ranking or the fact it's commercial: I happen to have a day job, I make a decent living out of it, and I don't plan to live off mudding at all. I don't have a live MUD, so I couldn't care less about who's popular and who isn't, either.
Then there's Hephos, who's currently developping an independent codebase. He also runs Sharune, which is currently registered as a DIKUrative on here and TMC. And he still doesn't want to explain his motives...
Nope. They said that a strict interpretation of the letter of the license allowed them to break the spirit of the license. When enough people indicated their disgust at this line of reasoning, they said that since the intent wasn't entirely clear, they didn't have a meeting of minds and hence no contract. That lasted just about as long as it took someone to point out that in that case they weren't allowed to run a dikurative at all. Just after that, another observant person mentionned that the strict letter of the license didn't allow for donations vs. in-game benefits, and after some lenghty nit-picking of the meaning of "profit" which eventually demonstrated that they couldn't exchange in-game perks for cash we're talking ethics again, this time because those evil DIKU folks don't just reissue a licence which suits the commercial interests.
That's no debate on ethics, that's a purely opportunistic series of attempts to attain but one goal: to use DIKUrative work for monetary gain.
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