Here's another hypothetical to throw out just for purposes of discussion on this assumption issue.  

Suppose I release a mud server under my own license, and within that server I have rape-n-pasted the Apache html header parsing routines, and perhaps some well-known GPLed regex code.  

Are you going to assume that the Apache Group and the author of the regex has given me permission to do so, or are you going to raise some concerns or perhaps holy #### about it?  ;-)

I think your assumptions that I don't have permission to do that are warranted and raising a ruckus might be justified.  Don't you?

There lay the difference I think in assuming the Diku area authors are fine with the Diku distribution versus Fiest, McCaffrey or Tolkein.  Direct involvement in the project led to that assumption.

Minor issue:
I still disagree with notion that there is separation of areas from documentation from code.  There just isn't any of that as the game is both inoperable without them and there aren't in fact separated from each other (least not in Diku) as they're in a big tinyworld glob in the distro, a collective work.  Sure the argument may be valid for Merc 2.2 or ROM which does have separation. Still the area authors have that direct involvement.