Top Mud Sites Forum Return to TopMudSites.com
Go Back   Top Mud Sites Forum > Mud Development and Administration > Legal Issues
Click here to Register

Closed Thread
 
Thread Tools
Old 11-04-2003, 01:49 PM   #121
Hephos
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: www.sharune.com
Posts: 359
Hephos is on a distinguished road
Hephos is offline  
Old 11-04-2003, 10:24 PM   #122
John
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 252
John is on a distinguished road
John is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 04:54 AM   #123
Kastagaar
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Hampshire, UK
Posts: 117
Kastagaar is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Kastagaar
From which we can see that the compound verb "to make (a) profit" is a subset of those meanings from the verb "to profit".

I can profit from setting up a business.
I can make a profit from setting up a business.

I can profit from having a medical checkup.
I cannot make a profit from having a medical checkup.
Kastagaar is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 06:30 AM   #124
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Thumbs down

This is really getting ludicrous.

Every single MUD admin with an ounce of ethics knows that DIKU is not for commercial use.

Every single MUD admin with an ounce of ethics knows that this extends to using _any_ part of DIKU in exchange for money.

The only people I've seen arguing and splitting hairs about the meaning of every single word in the license are those intent on breaking it.

You can twist it every way you want, the fact remains: you _know_ what the DIKU team meant. If you want to make money off the MUD, stop using a DIKUrative.

Have you no honour? No decency? If you're proud of being the scourge of the mudding community, good for you, but spare us your pathetic legalese hair-splitting, wriggling and distorting and endless discussions of what "making any profit" means.

If you can't get your players to donate without exchanging in-game benefits, that certainly doesn't speak well of the quality of your MUD and your administration.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 10:40 AM   #125
Sinuhe
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 55
Sinuhe is on a distinguished road
Is that so?

Who is this new poster, Fiendish, with the trollish name?
What credibility does an anonymous poster like this have?
Why did he jump into the discussion at this late stage?
What are his motives for posting?
What is his 'normal' identity on the boards and why doesn't he use that?

See, I too have made myself a mew identity. Just so I can ask these questions.
What is my credibility?
None.
What is his credibility?
None.
Anonymous posts are not even worth the toilet paper they are written on.
But there is a difference between me and Fiendish. He made his identity so he could post anonymously. I made mine to prove a point about anonymous posts.

Why should we believe an anonymous troll over a wellknown and longtime respected poster like KaVir? Especially since not even the most loudmouthed advocates of violating the licence have even tried to question his integrity?

And why did Fiendish present the question to that lawyer in such a twisted and biased way? Talk about leading questions.
He might just as well have angled it as follows:

Question: If a software licence for a product has been used by a large community of people for a period of over 10 years, and there has been a general concensus between the copyright holders and this community about the intent and interpretation of the licence during that entire time period, and all abusers of the licence have been shunned by this same community during that same period, what rule should the user follow? Should they follow the intent of the copyright holders, who on single attempts to break the agreement in the past have confirmed and clarified this interpretation? Or should they follow the lead of a few greedy customers, who want to abuse the intent of a licence that most of their competitors respect, for their own personal gain and to get an edge in the competition?

I didn't think Aardwolf should be banned from the list when this thread started. After seeing the deterioration of the general moral on this board that this and the Diku thread started by the_logost already has lead to, I've changed my mind. Aardwolf may not be quite as blatantly violating the Diku licence as Medievia, but the facts are that they are violating it, that they keep doing it even after it was pointed out to them, and that they show absolutely no remorse for doing it. They should be banned as an example, and to keep the the moral of the community from deteriorating completely.

And also because using 'donation money' to pay for an advertising banner hardly could be defined as necessary costs to keep the mud up and running.
If there is a 'thin line' as Lasher calls it, they crossed it with that action.

If and when they ever launch that new code, they can be admitted back on the list.

So I am posing a straight question to Synozeer: Is Aardwolf going to be banned from the list or not? There are a few of us that would like to know.
Sinuhe is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 11:31 AM   #126
Hephos
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: www.sharune.com
Posts: 359
Hephos is on a distinguished road
Hephos is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 12:19 PM   #127
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Yeah, sure.

When Matt has, ever since joining this board, done nothing but try to weaken the license at all costs, in any possible way. When Matt, running a commercial operation, isn't even supposed to have a stake in DIKU at all.

What some of us do wonder is what Matt's real motives are.

It certainly isn't altruism, if it were, he'd actually try to strengthen the license rather than water it down ("Hey, just incorporate yourselves, it's cheap and I'll help you do it").

Which begs the question, what could be the potential benefit to one commercial MUD if the DIKU license is further watered down.

I can obviously only speculate. The only rational explanation which comes to mind being that for some reason, a strong DIKU license is a direct threat to his own operation... And, call me paranoid all you want, the only reason in my book that DIKU could threaten Matt's codebases would be that if those weren't after all, really completely coded from scratch.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 12:56 PM   #128
Hephos
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: www.sharune.com
Posts: 359
Hephos is on a distinguished road
Hephos is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 01:39 PM   #129
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Pardon my French, Hephos, but you're raving. You're rehashing exactly the same arguments Microsoft spews against Linux. And it's a huge load of tosh.

Want to go commercial? Go ahead. With enough money, you can do a LOT better than dikuratives. Only problem, you'll have to do the legwork yourself.

You can actually buy the Valhalla Mud Engine (Diku II) and use it for commercial purposes. Oh wait, no, what you want is a free DIKU you can use to make money with.

What you don't realize is that most people contribute without caring for money, but simply for recognition among their peers. What you don't realize either is that while there's enough players to feed a 3000+ free MUDs, there's not enough among them who would pay for the same thing.

Obivously they would. Easy money has always been very attractive to certain type of people.

Yeah, right. Because whenever a nifty snippet will appear among the not-for-profit world, there won't be a commercial MUD with similar features who'll threaten lawsuits, right?

How? Tell me, how will any free mud benefit from commercial code? Hey, in the LP world, there's one pretty successful commercial venture. It's called Threshold. Funny that I've never seen any code contributed by Aristotle to the free community since he went for-pay, huh? And where are those nifty snippets donated by Matt? Where are the public code contributions from Medievia?

Hey, I have good news for you, Hephos: All those contributors have nothing against a more commercialized mud industry. Indeed, most of us couldn't care less. The only thing we are against is commercial people making money off our work. Nobody is stopping you from creating your own commercial MUD, you know. Nobody's even stopping you from commercializing your MUD client. As long as you commercialize your own work, it's fine and dandy. The rest of us seem to believe in the virtues of freeware.

Most of it being adware nowadays. Thank you, but no thanks.

Actually, they probably can't because they're still bound to university rules about IP made during their student days, and because they actually have an ounce of ethics.
What they _could_ do, however, is just change their license so that every aspiring Vryce and even the slightly more begnin Aardwolf won't have the slightest doubt that they can't make money off DIKU, even if it's only to pay for their banner, pardon server costs.

There used to be a time, in socialist Europe, where universitieswere relatively free from market pressure, and it was considered normal that student work made on university equipement could not be sold to commercial interests. Fancy that idea, for some reason most commercial enterprises tend to be quite averse to the notion that stuff their employees produce on the company's equipment can be commercialized by their employees either. Oddly enough, they don't seem to think this discourages their R&D efforts...


Do us all a favour and stop trying to take us for a ride. We're actually not stupid enough to fall for such arguments.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 02:19 PM   #130
Hephos
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: www.sharune.com
Posts: 359
Hephos is on a distinguished road
We are already deveoping our own game engine. for more info.

No, I don't personally want that. DIKUmud is a pile of horsedung.

Of course I know that, and we're already developing our own game engine, and have been for a long time.
Hephos is offline  
Old 11-05-2003, 03:05 PM   #131
Hodor
New Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 6
Hodor is on a distinguished road
For the record, Fiendish is an extremely well known player on Aardwolf, among other things a clanleader. Allthough i don't really know him, i can imagine why he joined the forums now. Since Lasher asked us to check this site and vote we have taken an enormous amount of heat (and defense), the discussion taking up a large portion of the total posts of this forum. So he asks a lawyer about it, and posts the response. That you argue about the response, his opinions etcet. is fine, but attacking someone's credibility without asking about it first seems a like a shortcut to me. I'm not going to be dragged into the trenchwar you guys have going on other then look at the new posts after i voted, but attacking someone just because he's new to the forums really ticked me off.

cast flameproof self,

Hodor

The above was a PERSONAL statement, attack me on it if you feel i deserve it, i have nothing to with Aardwolf other then spending way too much time there as a player.
Hodor is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 12:22 AM   #132
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
So what's your reason for weakening the DIKU license, then? Why would you care about Aardwolf in the first place?

And moreover, what has _your_ own independent codebase to gain if the most widespread freebie's license is shred apart? You should be fighting nails and teeth to uphold DIKU's IP rights just to make sure there isn't a precedent on MUD IP which could end up most defavorably for your own codebase.

It goes even further: with your will to go commercial, a strong DIKU license presents a higher barrier of entry for potential competitors of yours - because nobody can start a legit MUD business by merely downloading a DIKUrative, slapping a few snippets on it, recompiling it and running it within one day.

Your two last posts, however, lead to the exact same suspiscions than those concerning Achea. The only way you can gain anything from a weakened or commercial DIKU license is if you have some horrible DIKU code left in your own supposedly original game engine.

Oh, and your web site is down.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 05:20 AM   #133
John
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 252
John is on a distinguished road
John is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 06:50 AM   #134
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Nice strawman arguments here, John.

A strong DIKU license doesn't change anything about how long it takes people to open a free MUD. It doesn't make it more difficult for them. However, it forces those with commercial ambition to invest something in their own work - an almost mandatory effort should I think, considering how all those pro-commercial folks are quick to point out just how bad the DIKU code is.

You're trying to make it sound like a harder commercialization of a DIKUrative gets, the harder it gets to set up a free MUD. This is obviously a complete falsehood.

Oh, and for the record, I'm coding an LPC mud, it's not open to the public, and given my progress rate, is unlikely to open within quite a few months.

Strong IP for MUDs benefits everyone, including the commercial ventures.

Funny you'd say that. Since the only people obviously weakening it are those intent on breaking it.

And they're not discussing morals either, they're trying to bend the license terms to suit their needs - then, when questionned about their motives, they still don't talk values or ideals, but quick, quick, come with the "hey, we're recoding from scratch, so we're the good guys, right?". And then there's Hephos with "commercial is good, giving credit where credit is due is bad".

I'm a very stupid person, with a very limited imagination and a rampant paranoia, you know. There's certainly a very reasonable, rational and simple explanation for all this, but I just can't figure it out. I'm perfectly willing to hear it, however.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 07:35 AM   #135
Hephos
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: www.sharune.com
Posts: 359
Hephos is on a distinguished road
Uhmm. Sharpen up. I've never said it is bad to give credits where it is due.

I said some people were, imo, only hunting for getting their names in games credits, without actually bothering about the quality of games. They want their names stamped in stock games, and they believe it is good for the overall game quality? bah. Muds would have been so much more fun without all silly snippets and sucky code, and games would actually maybe be different from each others.
Hephos is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 08:12 AM   #136
John
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 252
John is on a distinguished road
John is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 08:46 AM   #137
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Hey, there's again a very simple solution for that. It's called "don't use those snippets".

Also, people coding small snippets adding one often very tiny aspect to a game might be hard-pressed to think how exactly their small snippet might affect the overall quality of any given MUD it could potentially be used on. That ought to be the job of any MUD's imp - as are all matters of balancing out features.

Now there is obviously a learning curve, and often the newbie admin might be tempted by quantity / "coolness" over quality and balance - until he might learn better.

Now, though, do you know any successful DIKUrative which is just an off-the-shelf codebase with a rag-tag assortment of snippets thrown in? I sure don't. But I know a certain amount of MUD coders and admins who started out this way, learned their stuff and started to get good at it after a while. All without violating neither letter nor spirit of the licenses, might I add.

Plus, as long as we're in the freebie area, I personally wouldn't mind at all having eg an alternative combat handler to tweak rather than the stock one - even if it would only give me additional ideas to make my own stuff. I sure wouldn't want a commercial library for that purpose, and I'll sooner continue to fiddle on my own rather than get a commercial product.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 09:15 AM   #138
Alastair
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Switzerland
Posts: 120
Alastair is on a distinguished road
Send a message via Yahoo to Alastair
Matt claims indeed to have an independent codebase. He's also the one who, after a rather, let's call it creative, reading of the DIKU license, was advertising services to have all dikurative MUD admins incorporate as LLCs so that they can cricumvent the "not make *ANY* profits* clause.

As I said, picture me paranoid, I just can't see what he's got to gain in all this. Full disclosure: I'm biased against Matt, and have been for a long time. Nothing he posted has ever changed my opinion, though - it only conforted me. And that's got nothing to do with Achea's ranking or the fact it's commercial: I happen to have a day job, I make a decent living out of it, and I don't plan to live off mudding at all. I don't have a live MUD, so I couldn't care less about who's popular and who isn't, either.

Then there's Hephos, who's currently developping an independent codebase. He also runs Sharune, which is currently registered as a DIKUrative on here and TMC. And he still doesn't want to explain his motives...

Nope. They said that a strict interpretation of the letter of the license allowed them to break the spirit of the license. When enough people indicated their disgust at this line of reasoning,  they said that since the intent wasn't entirely clear, they didn't have a meeting of minds and hence no contract. That lasted just about as long as it took someone to point out that in that case they weren't allowed to run a dikurative at all. Just after that, another observant person mentionned that the strict letter of the license didn't allow for donations vs. in-game benefits, and after some lenghty nit-picking of the meaning of "profit" which eventually demonstrated that they couldn't exchange in-game perks for cash we're talking ethics again, this time because those evil DIKU folks don't just reissue a licence which suits the commercial interests.

That's no debate on ethics, that's a purely opportunistic series of attempts to attain but one goal: to use DIKUrative work for monetary gain.
Alastair is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 10:41 AM   #139
Sinuhe
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 55
Sinuhe is on a distinguished road
Hodor:I stand corrected and apologise to Fiendish for the rash conclusion and unintended insult.
Apparently he is not some Admin posing under a new name, but a dedicated Aardwolf player. That certainly explains both his motive for posting and why he posed that question to the lawyer in such a biased way.

It does however raise some new questions:

Players are generally known to be extremely loyal to the muds they play, and to defend them to the extreme, using any arguments they can dig up. That is all very commendable of course, but it doesn't really lay the foundation for unbiased opinions. Because players are also generally known to not giving a hoot about ethical aspects, as long as they can keep playing their favourite mud. Endless threads about Medievia over the years proves that.

So my questions now are:

Before jumping in on this thread, what did this poster know about the Diku licence, the Diku Hall of Shame, the Medievia discussion and all the other discussions about violating the licence that have been going on for over a decade?

What does he know about the work that goes into coding a mud from scratch and how much of that work an unscrupulous admin could spare by just stealing someone else’s codebase and claim it to be their own?

Does the ethical aspect even bother him at all here?

Another thing that astonishes me about players is how extremely naive they can be at times. Deathwing even wrote this in a previous thread:


Which raises some more questions:
How can he state this with such confidence?
Have the Aaardwolf admins confided in him what their plans are?

No offence, but this sounds like a very bad case wistful thinking.

A Mud hardly goes commercial unless they really mean to make some profit.
Which in turn means, that as soon as they can openly do it, they will start collecting the money. There will be no more pretences about ‘donations’. Once they go fully commercial, all players will either have to pay a yearly/monthly fee to play, or, more likely, they’ll go for the system of selling in-game-benefits for real money, that has already been proven so ‘successful’ in Achaea.

Expecting Aardwolf to stay the same after they have gone commercial is rather naive. Some players might perhaps like the idea of buying advantages for money, apparently many do. But don’t expect the mud to stay ‘free’. The money they plan to make has to come from the players, in one way or another.

If I am wrong in this assumption, I am sure that any of the Aardwolf admin will come forward here and claim otherwise. And perhaps that would be a good idea in any case.

So, Aardwolf, what are your intentions when going commercial? Will the money be taken out as monthly/yearly fees, or as payment for in-game benefits? I’m sure some of your players would like to know.
Sinuhe is offline  
Old 11-06-2003, 10:59 AM   #140
Sinuhe
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 55
Sinuhe is on a distinguished road
Alastair to Hephos:
Interesting conspiracy theory, Alastair, but there is a much simpler answer to that, which Hephos obligingly provided himself:

Hephos:
Naturally the big commercial muds would like more free muds going commercial. If they do, they’d have to compete on the same terms as the other commercials, who then would have the gross advantage of an already established larger playerbase.

The real threat against the commercials is not other commercial muds, but the free muds, especially the good free muds, with a stable playerbase. These have the unique competition advantage of being free. So naturally a person like matt has an interest in changing that. Didn’t you ever ask yourself why he took on such a sanctimonious attitude about IP theft when it concerned a big mud being loosely based on Tolkien’s work, while at the same time he shows a total disregard for the IP of the Diku creators?

Of course the more of the competition they can eliminate, the better for them too. Every mud that shuts down will mean more potential players for themselves. So if any unscrupulous and overoptimistic  "highly modified" STOCK mud owner can be persuaded to try and make their players pay to play, so much the better for the commercials. Regardless of the ethical aspects, few players will pay for a next-to-stock mud, so they will most likely dig their own grave.

It’s amazing how gullible some people are. They don’t even realise when they are being conned. So maybe they should all thank Hephos for providing that information, whether it was a Freudian slip or not.
Sinuhe is offline  
Closed Thread


Thread Tools


Aardwolf commercially violating diku licence - Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Diku license the_logos Legal Issues 86 07-27-2007 08:31 AM
What if there had never been DIKU? Threshold Tavern of the Blue Hand 24 05-26-2006 07:43 PM
The DIKU license the_logos Tavern of the Blue Hand 242 05-06-2006 12:28 PM
original Diku? david Advertising for Players 0 02-16-2006 02:26 AM
Aardwolf presents - Aardwolf Hold'em! Filt MUD Announcements 0 09-05-2005 05:34 PM

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

All times are GMT -4. The time now is 04:34 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Style based on a design by Essilor
Copyright Top Mud Sites.com 2022