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Despite the fact that I tried to organize a lawsuit against Medievia on behalf of the DIKU license holders I had, foolishly, never actually read the license, instead relying on the interpretations of the license bandied about by Kavir and others with an interest in this area.
I've got a fair bit of experience with licensing, both in terms of being the licensee (technology, the rights to Feist's work) and in terms of being the licensor (Rapture, Achaea codebase, our java client) and have spent countless hours pouring over the contracts for those various licenses and dealing with the lawyers on both sides. I'm not a lawyer and I'm especially not a lawyer who specializes in IP work but I have enough practical experience to have a couple comments:
1. Whoever wrote this license had no business writing licenses. Total amateur hour.
2. The relevant bit of the license reads as follows:
"You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge for 'sending the disk' or 'just for the disk' etc."
We can ignore the distribution clause as selling people things in-game, or charging subscriptions for access has nothing to do with distribution of the DIKU code. So, we're left with the prohibition against profit. However, the license completely fails to define its terms and that clause, at least, has no inherent meaning. Everything I write below is applicable in the US and isn't intended for application in other countries as I'm not familiar with the legal codes of other countries or the tax implications of actions in other countries.
If you're an individual and you're running a mud that takes money for any reason, you may be violating the license. I say may be because that entire clause would likely just be thrown out by a court since it's impossibly vague. The law does not recognize the concept of a virtual business (ie where cost can offset revenue in order to turn all or a portion of that revenue) except where there is a stated intention to one day generate a profit.
For example, without incorporating as a company or declaring a sole proprietorship, you could decide that you are going to become a video game consultant. In that case, you could likely get away with deducting the cost of video games purchased (research) but only for a limited time. If you show no genuine effort at trying to become profitable, the IRS will quickly disallow those deductions.
Since hobbyist muds are, by definition, not trying to make a profit, the IRS would not recognize revenue coming in from players of the mud as being offset in any way by costs for running the mud. The mud isn't a business and thus expenses to support it do not offset revenue gained from it. In other words, you are actually legally obligated to report any money you get from your playerbase (in the case of a hobbyist mud taking money to pay for upkeep costs) as income because it IS profit/income.
On the other hand, since profit is so ill-defined it is easy to simply not make a profit if you treat your mud as a genuine commercial enterprise. Form a company, partnership, or LLC, and then just pay yourself a salary high enough that there's never a dime in profit. Or, form a hosting company whose sole job it is to host the DIKU being run by your other company, and make sure you charge the DIKU-running company an amount that ensures there is no profit to the DIKU-running company. There are a thousand ways to not show a profit for the enterprise while ensuring the individuals who work for the enterprise get money.
These are easy, essentially rock-solid ways to avoid violating the license. There's very little room to quibble here too since wiping out profit in this manner is both completely legal and quite common. The movie industry does it all the time, for instance. (Which is a good reason why one should never accept a percent of the front end. Always insist on the back end as it's MUCH MUCH harder to manipulate the back end figures.)
Anyway, the fact is, the DIKU license doesn't prevent people making money from DIKU. Ironically, it just prevents hobbyists from taking money from the playerbase to support the mud (as, again, that money is all profit regardless of whether you use it to support the mud or not).
I'm sure the inevitable argument is going to be that my solutions violate the spirit of the license and in fact that's probably true, though that's purely speculation on my part. I'm not a mindreader. Either way though, it's irrelevant. Contracts stand on their own and have to say -everything- because anything they don't say isn't relevant or applicable. It is, in fact, unfair to a licensee to assume that the intentions of the licensor matter. A licensee only gets the contract and cannot be expected to do anything but follow the letter of the contract. If the licensor doesn't consider it worthwhile to write a decent contract, that's the licensor's problem. It's why lawyers get paid so much and use legalese: Detail and un-ambiguity are expensive.
--matt
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