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Old 04-22-2013, 04:44 PM   #64
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
Posts: 849
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

You're not understanding even a little of the issue regarding advertising and licensing. I'm not talking about copyright of the theme of the mud. I'm talking about the copyright and licensing of the CODE of the mud. The actual code that the mud developer uses, as his primary method of writing the game. The code - in MOST text-based games, is either DIKU, LP, CIRCLE, or a derivitive of those three. As such, the mud developer has agreed to not charge players to play those muds. They are -required- to be free to play. The mud developer is not -allowed- to receive money from players to use for advertising - one of them won't let the developer receive money for any reason at all, and DIKUs are a little looser, and allow donations - but not a fee, and never required, - to cover the cost of the server.

The only people who are allowed to charge for muds, are people who create the *code* itself, from scratch, or people who use codebases that come with commercial licenses. There are very very few of either in existence. The vast majority of text-based muds in existence are DIKU, LP, and Circle - and derivitives thereof.
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