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True. What they had was a usage contract and a contract can be renegotiated by both parties to provide for royalties.
I'm not damning anyone. In fact, I find the stipulation to never allow commercial gain off a DIKU derivative to be limiting and harmful.
And yep, I agree with you that if Medevia just put up the DIKU authors credits I think the majority of people would not have any beef against them.
I'm sure most of the DIKU folk poured their blood, sweat and tears into making the lib and only wanted some appreciation in return. Vryce no doubt put in innumerable hours of work as well, and likely most of the code is now original. But even if DIKU was only used as a test harness to recode the majority of the mud, that's still a very significant contribution.
If I had written DIKU back then, I would be proud if one of the most successful muds started with my codebase and was thanking me. All I saw on Medevia's startup page were negative points about how bad DIKU was. Well, it was the one they picked over others, so to them it was the best choice that existed back then to go forward from.
Xotl
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