[Soleil]

I was going to post this in the other thread but didn't want to be shunned for being off-topic and such, and as someone mentioned, here's a new thread for this...

If what was posted in the other thread is indeed true, if Aardwolf IS accepting money and IS giving in-game rewards, where's the shunning, blackballing, flaming, etc every time Aardwolf is mentioned, that other 'license breakers' get??  Call it sour grapes or tattletaling or what-have-you, but if Medievia is going to get crap EVERY TIME it's mentioned, I would think that another game doing the same thing should be treated the same.  

Where's KaVir asking for code audits?  Where's the removal from certain sites because of this issue?  Why isn't this game being treated the way they should be treated, as another 'bad part' of the MUD community?

Ok, that's that rant, here's another..

If, in fact, the DIKU people HAVE seen Aardwolf's code and has NOT cared the least bit about the license, it being a derivative, accepting money, etc., why the hell does this even all matter anymore??  According to KaVir, and the endless links he throws out, once a derivative, always a derivative.  So, no matter how much they changed their code, it will always be DIKU, no matter what the authors say.  If the DIKU author doesn't care, why the hell do the rest of you care? Why is this still an issue?

[nhl]

The "once a derivative, always a derivative" does not quite hold true. You can look for example, at the recent SCO versus the-rest-of-the-world litigation and the discussion that followed. As SCO claimed that the Linux sourcecode contained copyrighted works of SCO, both IBM and Opensource (and Linus Torvalds) requested SCO to identify the infringing pieces of code so that those could be rewritten.

Now, according to the "once a derivative, always a derivative" rule, obviously no such rewriting could occur, especially since the parts SCO claims they own the copyrights to, have been released in source format. Hence, if the "once a derivative, always a derivative" rule actually would hold up in source code development, a single code contribution could pollute the development of large projects (indefinetly, since those code contributions could not be replaced by non-infringing pieces of code), thus making the whole open source development model unviable.

[the_logos]

I'd tend to say it's because the people who attack Medievia do so not out of principle, but out of personal dislike for the operators of Medievia.

Let's not go there though. The DIKU license holder is clearly aware of what Aardwolf is doing and the fact that he's not sued them, hasn't expressed any outrage over it, etc tells me that he doesn't view it as a violation of the DIKU license.

It's funny that the only people who get outraged about this are just observers rather than the people who are supposedly being hurt (the license holders).

And, as has been said before, the DIKU license prohibits profit, not revenue. Without financial statements, there is no way to determine whether a profit is being made or not.

--matt

[KaVir]

They get it from time to time, but not as badly as you, because their crime isn't as bad as yours. They certainly violate the intent of the licence (they sell in-game benefits), and if it were up to me they would indeed be banned.

But if your mud - which has stripped out the credits, removed the copyright notices, and makes sufficient profit to live off - is allowed to remain in the listings, then I see little chance of getting Aardwolf banned.

I audited your code to prove that your claims of originality were false. Aardwolf admits that they are a Diku derivative, however, which would make such an audit pointless. If you'd simply admitted you were a Diku derivative, then I wouldn't have needed to audit Medievia either.

That is correct (). However according to the quote they're not "changing" their code over time, they're rewriting it completely from scratch in clean-room conditions, with one of the original Diku team monitoring the situation to verify the truth of their claims.

[KaVir]

That is a point of contention. Were Aardwolf to strip out the Diku credits and claim to be original, however, with plenty of evidence proving otherwise, I strongly suspect they'd get exactly the same response as Medievia.

[the_logos]

If they violate the intent of the license, why is Hans (one of the DIKU license holders) not objecting to them? He's working with them even as they violate what you claim is the intent of the license. And yes, they sell in-game benefits, but they are selling their content, not the DIKU license. The license doesn't say anything about selling your own content.


You don't know they make any profit. If they pay themselves salaries, that's simply an expense, no different from paying for bandwidth or a server.

I swear, I'm half-tempted to just buy the Diku license and remove all restrictions so that people can just stop having these pointless arguments and so more MUD operators have increased freedom to operate their MUDs as they wish.

--matt

[Ilkidarios]

Thank god, someone listened to me on the forum!

But anyways, now that this is in the proper medium, I'm going to say one thing: I really don't care. The makers of DIKU rarely care, so why should I? The way I think of it, if the DIKU people don't feel the need to take action against Aardwolf, then there's no issue.

It's not like Aardwolf is some small-time MUD that can get away with this stuff because it's "under the radar". I think the DIKU people have heard of this, and really just don't care.

That's all I have to say.

[nhl]

I was not aware the license is for sale. Nonetheless, my personal view is that the DIKU license does much more harm than good to the DIKU community. And as previously mentioned, it has never been held up in a court (I doubt it would, and the DIKU authors would take a significant risk in actually trying it, since a failure to uphold it would open the door for countless of other DIKU-based MUD's to implement revenue models).

[Hephos]

It is pretty simple imo... diku owners don't care because if they care, it would probably cost them more by taking any legal actions or whatever against people abusing their license than they would ever get from doing it. Its not worthwhile for them to care about it.

Now... if a game like everquest gets in the loop, they start to care (and I even recall they looking into that or something) because they would probably have something to win from it.

[KaVir]

Why don't you ask him?

Not my claim - but that of Michael Seifert and Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt, the two members of the Diku team who are still active. I think it's fair to say that they know what the intent of their own licence is, don't you?

And nobody has said that Hans is "working" with them. Aardwolf have simply claimed that he looked at their new codebase and was satisfied that it is original. I also looked at the Medievia codebase, but I hope you're not suggesting I worked with them?

If the content is part of the game, then it falls under the licence. If you disagree with that, then by the same reasoning the other IRE muds would only have to pay you royalties for content that you had created - any new content they made could be sold and they could keep every last cent. Is that really your view? Because I'm sure the other IRE muds would be interested to hear about it.

You would have to find all the contributors first, which would rather unlikely to say the least.

[the_logos]

Kavir wrote:
I think it's fair to say that they can say the intent is whatever they wish to say it is. On the other hand, a license is a legal document and it says what it says. In a contract (which is what a license is), one party's interpretation holds no more weight than the others. That's why the opinion that matters comes from the court, not from one side of a two-party contract.

The license only speaks about DikuMUD, not about the MUD you end up making. In fact, the license is quite specific in referring to DikuMUD and not products that might be made with DikuMUD. This is much like the license for most software. You can't resell MS Word, but you can certainly sell any document you make with it.

Look, if the Diku license spelled out that there are restrictions on charging for products made with Diku, that'd be one thing. It doesn't though.

This paragraph completely misses everything regarding how Iron Realms works. It's really strange for you to presume to comment on IRE's setup when I am quite positive you've never seen the operating agreements for any of the Iron Realms companies, nor any of the relevant contracts which you're commenting on.

--matt

[Splork]

I believe the original authors have explained themselves several times as to why why they never took any action. I've corresponded with Michael Seifert several times a few years ago. Mostly to simply say thank you and apologize for the actions of a few people that I disagree with and I was sure he did as well.

I honestly have no problems with muds that sell stuff to keep their mud running, or for that matter to make a living. But I definately have a problem with people yanking the credits and claiming it as their own. Ofcourse, I would never play one:-)
Each of us has to draw the line somewhere...

Our mud is one of the oldest Diku's in existance. Over the first few years, somehow the credits were removed. We were contacted by the diku website, made aware of our glitch and promptly added them back. Its just the right thing to do.

The differences between Aardwolf and nameless mud is quite obviously in how they carry themselves. A small example of this is Vyrce's denial that he is a Diku derivitive. While Aardwolf's owner seaks out the original authors thoughts, opinions, and most likely blessing. Huge difference. There are many more but they have been rehashed enough around here, especially when it seems to somehow enter every thread...

Shrugs...

[KaVir]

In the case of your codebase the licence may well be a contract, but the same is not necessarily true for Diku:



"A software licence is not necessarily a contract. It can be, but that requires a couple of preconditions to be satisfied. One of those preconditions is the existence of consideration on both sides. Consideration is a legal concept that simply means a quid-pro-quo, or something of value given by each party in exchange for what the other party provides. In the case of open source software, there usually isn't anything provided by the licensee of the software (that is, the person who uses it) back to the licensor (usually, the person who wrote it). As a consequence of this lack of consideration there is no contract between the licensee and licensor."

However those muds are still Diku derivatives, and are bound by the same licence.

And you can sell areas you produce on a DikuMUD.  But you cannot sell your Diku derivative, any more than you could reverse engineer, modify and sell MS Word.

And the wording in that regard is certainly one of the main points of contention, as I mentioned earlier, and probably one of the reasons why Aardwolf doesn't get as much negative attention as Medievia.  I think you'll agree that the law is pretty clear about removing copyright notices, and that the licence is fairly clear in regard to credit notices?

[Threshold]

Wouldn't this mean that nobody who ever worked on Aardwolf or saw their code could be a part of the coding team that created the "new" mudlib/game?

If there are any people who worked on both, doesn't that make it not a clean-room situation?

[Aardwolf]

I want to make it very clear that we are not claiming to have the blessing of Hans Staerfeldt for using in-game items to fund the mud. We did discuss it, we agreed to disagree and not discuss the subject again and then moved on to discussing the new code base. He also did point out that if they (or more likely, the DIKU institution) decide to try to legalize their "intent" of the license we could become a target, but would clearly not be first on their list.

It has been quite some time since our last contact and I still have to send him a final version of our new code before it goes live for a final verification that it has not been "contaminated" (his words) with DIKU code.

[Threshold]

(I would have added this via an edit, but someone posted after me and it is bad form to change a post that has posts after it):

Of course, all of this is pretty irrelevant since the DIKU license itself is relatively porous and the DIKU creators really don't seem to care. They seem to care more about the credits issue than the "profit" issue. I vaguely recall that the main reason for the "profit" stipulation was because they created it while at a University (from whence the name DIKU is derived) and the Uni required it.

[KaVir]

A clean-room situation usually consists of copying someone else's functionality (which isn't a copyright infringement) while proving that you had no access to the original work.

It's a defence, basically. Documented proof that can stand up against the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test, by providing an evidence trail of independent creation.

If the original Aardwolf team also worked on the new mud, then they might unconsciously copy parts of it, which could cause problems during the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test were the case to go to court. It could weaken their defence, although they've made a very smart move by involving one of the Diku team.

[the_logos]

Interesting. I didn't actually know that. I'm not sure it changes anything though, as regardless, one party in a lawsuit's interpretation of a license isn't going to hold more weight than another's, all other things being equal.

That's my opinion at least, and I think there's significant justification for it. In the end though, this is why the rule of law matters: It exists to resolve these disputes, and it's the only valid route for resolution of a legal dispute.


Oh, sure, they're definitely bound by the same license, but my point is that the license, which I've quoted below for people who aren't familiar with it, doesn't speak to works created with the DikuMUD software. It only speaks about DikuMUD itself and what you may charge for with it.

Right, you can't sell your Diku derivative to someone else, but that doesn't stop you from selling items, for instance. That's not selling DikuMUD. That's not selling anything actually. It's just licensing in virtually all cases except for Second Life (and even there, despite Linden Labs claims, that's pretty debatable).

Adding to DikuMUD doesn't make your mud part of DikuMUD, which is what most of the license talks about.

Yeah, I agree that the copyright bit is fairly clear, providing that the entire license wouldn't simply be thrown out of court, which isn't out of the realm of possibility by any means. It's very badly written regardless of what one believes its intent is.

(Incidentally, I want to make clear that I have zero problem with anything that Aardwolf does that I'm aware of.)

--matt

[the_logos]

Diku license:

This document contains the rules by which you can use, alter or publish
parts of DikuMud. DikuMud has been created by the above five listed persons
in their spare time, at DIKU (Computer Science Instutute at Copenhagen
University). You are legally bound to follow the rules described in this
document.

Rules:

!! DikuMud is NOT Public Domain, shareware, careware or the like !!

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.
By breaking these rules you violate the agreement between us and the
University, and hence will be sued.

You may not remove any copyright notices from any of the documents or
sources given to you.

This license must *always* be included "as is" if you copy or give
away any part of DikuMud (which is to be done as described in this
document).

If you publish *any* part of dikumud, we as creators must appear in the
article, and the article must be clearly copyrighted subject to this
license. Before publishing you must first send us a message, by
snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us what, where and when you are
publishing (remember to include your address, name etc.)

If you wish to setup a version of DikuMud on any computer system, you
must send us a message , by snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us where
and when you are running the game. (remember to include
your address, name etc.)


Any running version of DikuMud must include our names in the login
sequence. Furthermore the "credits" command shall always cointain
our name, addresses, and a notice which states we have created DikuMud.

You are allowed to alter DikuMud, source and documentation as long as
you do not violate any of the above stated rules.

[KaVir]

However (from my previous link) "A licence does not grant you a legal right to the property that is being licensed to you. All it does is to make something lawful that would otherwise be unlawful" and "Because there is no enforceable contract, if the licence conditions are breached, the licensor's action against the licensee is simply an action for breach of copyright."

No licence means no permission to copy, distribute, derive from or display the work, as these are all rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder.