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Pardon my French, Hephos, but you're raving. You're rehashing exactly the same arguments Microsoft spews against Linux. And it's a huge load of tosh.
Want to go commercial? Go ahead. With enough money, you can do a LOT better than dikuratives. Only problem, you'll have to do the legwork yourself.
You can actually buy the Valhalla Mud Engine (Diku II) and use it for commercial purposes. Oh wait, no, what you want is a free DIKU you can use to make money with.
What you don't realize is that most people contribute without caring for money, but simply for recognition among their peers. What you don't realize either is that while there's enough players to feed a 3000+ free MUDs, there's not enough among them who would pay for the same thing.
Obivously they would. Easy money has always been very attractive to certain type of people.
Yeah, right. Because whenever a nifty snippet will appear among the not-for-profit world, there won't be a commercial MUD with similar features who'll threaten lawsuits, right?
How? Tell me, how will any free mud benefit from commercial code? Hey, in the LP world, there's one pretty successful commercial venture. It's called Threshold. Funny that I've never seen any code contributed by Aristotle to the free community since he went for-pay, huh? And where are those nifty snippets donated by Matt? Where are the public code contributions from Medievia?
Hey, I have good news for you, Hephos: All those contributors have nothing against a more commercialized mud industry. Indeed, most of us couldn't care less. The only thing we are against is commercial people making money off our work. Nobody is stopping you from creating your own commercial MUD, you know. Nobody's even stopping you from commercializing your MUD client. As long as you commercialize your own work, it's fine and dandy. The rest of us seem to believe in the virtues of freeware.
Most of it being adware nowadays. Thank you, but no thanks.
Actually, they probably can't because they're still bound to university rules about IP made during their student days, and because they actually have an ounce of ethics.
What they _could_ do, however, is just change their license so that every aspiring Vryce and even the slightly more begnin Aardwolf won't have the slightest doubt that they can't make money off DIKU, even if it's only to pay for their banner, pardon server costs.
There used to be a time, in socialist Europe, where universitieswere relatively free from market pressure, and it was considered normal that student work made on university equipement could not be sold to commercial interests. Fancy that idea, for some reason most commercial enterprises tend to be quite averse to the notion that stuff their employees produce on the company's equipment can be commercialized by their employees either. Oddly enough, they don't seem to think this discourages their R&D efforts...
Do us all a favour and stop trying to take us for a ride. We're actually not stupid enough to fall for such arguments.
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