[the_logos]

I just wanted to say that it's nice to see TMS growing with the addition of another major MUD - Medievia - to the list. The bigger MUDs bring a comparatively large # of users to the site via the voting mechanism, benefiting everyone.

Welcome!

--matt

[Angie]

Congrats on starting another flame thread, Matt. WTG.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Angie @ May 07 2005,07:51) Congrats on starting another flame thread, Matt. WTG.

Oh **** off.

It's called "Professional courtesy." The only people who will object are the ones that lack it.

--matt

[Soleil]

Thanks for the warm welcome Matt.  We are very grateful to have the opportunity to once again be a part of Topmudsites.

We are back and spanning our "advertising" due to the release of Medievia V.  We will be posting on the promotion forums soon enough as soon as we are out of beta testing and the features are live full time!

Soleil

[Angie]

Professional courtesy? My ass.

Medievia has been banned from the list, and for good reasons. Now that they've crawled back through the window, making a welcome post is asking for a flame war. No wonder most people here think you're an awful troll.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Soleil @ May 07 2005,07:57) We are back and spanning our "advertising" due to the release of Medievia V.  We will be posting on the promotion forums soon enough as soon as we are out of beta testing and the features are live full time! Soleil

Good stuff. Hope it all goes well!
--matt

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,13:53) Originally Posted by (Angie @ May 07 2005,07:51) Congrats on starting another flame thread, Matt. WTG. Oh **** off. It's called "Professional courtesy." The only people who will object are the ones that lack it. --matt

Coming from the person who once tried to collect money to sue Medievia, I find it extremely two-faced, and completely unsurprising.

"Professional courtesy"? Yes, I can see you've got a lot in common.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ May 07 2005,08:00) Coming from the person who once tried to collect money to sue Medievia, I find it extremely two-faced, and completely unsurprising. "Professional courtesy"?  Yes, I can see you've got a lot in common.

I realize the concept of evolving your opinion over time is foreign to you, but don't tar me with that brush. I based that proposed action on your own opinions, which was a mistake and for which I have already apologized and recanted.

--matt

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,14:06) I realize the concept of evolving your opinion over time is foreign to you, but don't tar me with that brush. I based that proposed action on your own opinions, which was a mistake and for which I have already apologized and recanted.

Where?  Cite, please.  The last time I've seen you post on this matter, all you said was "There seems no doubt that Medievia is violating the license. They may or may not be violating the profit part of the license (we have no way of knowing whether they are showing a profit or not) but they certainly do seem to be violating the bits involving proper credit."

Are you saying you no longer believe they don't give credit?

[Ytrewtsu]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,04:53) Oh **** off. It's called "Professional courtesy." The only people who will object are the ones that lack it.

Since when is that statement even remotely professional? If you were professional, you would extend that professionalism to everything and every contact you make in the community. I personally have no objection to your welcome but you are not qualified to judge professionalism judging by your statement.

[Valg]

Professional courtesy would include not stealing. Medievia has earned the contempt they have received, and will continue to receive.

In any event, having the_logos explain professional courtesy is like having R. Kelly explain dating etiquette.

[the_logos]

Professional courtesy gets extended to those who act like professionals, not bitter kids. I'm not interested in extending it to the handful of TMS people who do nothing but flame others. Look at the content of the post that started this thread. It was a genuine welcome to a major text MUD. That some felt the need to attack me for posting it is, in and of itself, indicative of the fact that "professional" doesn't apply to said people.

Anyway, once again, welcome, Medievia, and take comfort in the fact that your detractors are both irrelevant and impotent to do -anything- but gnash their teeth and stomp their feet. And props to Synozeer as well, for ignoring those who will complain about him doing the right thing by allowing Medievia back on the list.

Nothing else to say on this matter really.

--matt

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,23:45) Look at the content of the post that started this thread. It was a genuine welcome to a major text MUD.

The original post was a blatent attempt at starting yet another flame war - something the majority of your posts seem to be aimed towards causing.

Or are you honestly claiming to be so naive that you didn't know exactly what sort of response you'd get for welcoming the mud which is used as the example in almost every discussion about licence violation - a mud which caused so many flame wars that it eventually resulted in people putting together webpages with the facts to stop people repeating the same arguments every 6 months - a mud that even you admit is violating the Diku licence?

[Yui Unifex]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,17:45) Professional courtesy gets extended to those who act like professionals, not bitter kids.

So you think violating contractual obligations is a professional act? Amazing.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Or are you honestly claiming to be so naive that you didn't know exactly what sort of response you'd get for welcoming the mud which is used as the example in almost every discussion about licence violation

Of course I knew you and your ilk would start flaming for it. But so what? Why should I let a handful of angry people determine what I will and will not do when none of those people matter or have even an iota of power to change my course (or Medievia's course, for that matter) of action?

I mean, if Batmud (another major mud) suddenly started participating in the rankings, I'd have posted a similar congratulations, regardless of whether they were abusing IP or not (they had a Little Mermaid area there when I last played, for instance). TMS has lots of MUDs that are engaging in various IP violations and there's no policy on TMS that prohibits those MUDs from being listed.

If someone threw a hissy fit everytime someone mentioned object oriented code, what would be the reasonable course of action? To ignore the people throwing a hissy fit and talk about it anyway, or to let the fit-throwers implicitly censor what gets talked about just because they scream and whine a lot? The right answer, incidentally, is the former.

--matt

[tehScarecrow]

Good luck Medievia!

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by (Yui Unifex @ May 07 2005,18:55) Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,17:45) Professional courtesy gets extended to those who act like professionals, not bitter kids. So you think violating contractual obligations is a professional act?  Amazing.

Well, I'll tell you what ISN'T a professional act, at least: slandering people with absolutely no evidence beyond hearsay.

--matt

[tehScarecrow]

Ok, I'm not fully aware of the story behind Medievia, so if anyone wants to message it to me that would be appreciated.

What I do know is they've been around for like 14 years and DiKu is maybe 10% or less of their code at this point, and no one has done anything legally against them. So I'm really not seeing what the big deal is.

[Jazuela]

It's kinda like this:

You open a new fast food restaurant. You used to be the burger flipper for McDonald's, and as such, had all the exact recipes for each piece of food made, including their secret special sauce.

You also went to their burger flipping school and now know the secrets to their successful marketing strategies.

So you open up your new restaurant, rename everything using the same recipes..add a pinch of salt to everything, and call it "unique." Then you use the McDonald's strategies, rewriting each sentence by adding a single extra comma, and call it trademarked information.

And nowhere..not anywhere at all - do you even mention that McDonalds was the source of your genius.

Legal or not, it's unethical, unpleasant, and causes all the OTHER fast food joints to hire only family members, who have to recite a vow of secrecy upon penalty of death if they get caught giving the secret info to outsiders. The entire fast food industry suffers as a result, because no one is sharing information, no one is networking to improve customer service, or marketing, or quality of food.

This is what Medievia has done to the mud community. Because of them, several people who've developed new code bases have refused to make them open source, as has been the custom in the past. There are many new code bases, some of which are innovative and can do wonders for the community, but because Medievia used DIKU without its developers permission, without giving the developers credit, and then profited off it - clearly against the license they agreed to abide by, no one wants to trust the public to their own code bases anymore.

With good reason too. The world beyond the mud community doesn't really understand about muds enough to handle a court situation. Not to mention that DIKU was developed in one part of the world and the violator is in another part of the world, so the logistics involved in a lawsuit are pretty much - unviable.

So Medievia gets to continue doing what they're doing, and the entire community gets to continue suffering as a result. Using "only" 10% of the code is like saying a 2-month-pregnant woman is only 2/9 pregnant. You can't "slightly" steal something. Either you stole it or you didn't. Medievia did. Period.

[Yui Unifex]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 07 2005,22:42) Well, I'll tell you what ISN'T a professional act, at least: slandering people with absolutely no evidence beyond hearsay. --matt

You are just as aware as everyone else on the facts[1] surrounding their violations. We know you have a short fuse, but I doubt even you would be pushed to sue based on hearsay. Your attempt to paint their actions as "professional" is an extreme insult to real professionals everywhere.

[1] http://www.game.org/med/

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (the_logos @ May 08 2005,04:42) Well, I'll tell you what ISN'T a professional act, at least: slandering people with absolutely no evidence beyond hearsay.

Slander is spoken - libel is written, and doesn't apply in this case, because it also has to be false.

And as for 'absolutely no evidence beyond hearsay', that's absolute rubbish - I've provided statistical comparisons of the Medievia code vs Merc 1.0, and I have scanned copy of a statement signed by Vryce under penalty of perjury in which he states that the code I reviewed is "Medievia 4.1" - and that's without all the backing views of many other people who have seen the code (including at least one person who coded for Medievia). All this information has been available for years, specifically because of people claiming the sort of thing you're claiming now.

But tell me, if you believed there was no evidence, and that posting such claims about people without evidence is unprofessional, why did you repeatedly post things like:

"There seems no doubt that Medievia is violating the license. They may or may not be violating the profit part of the license (we have no way of knowing whether they are showing a profit or not) but they certainly do seem to be violating the bits involving proper credit."

And:

"Medievia IS violating the DIKU license. It's not including the proper credits to the DIKU authors...None of these facts are really in question."

You see, most of do know the facts, have plenty of evidence, and have used that as the basis for our opinions. There are other muds which I strongly suspect of violating the Diku licence as well, but without any evidence to back it up I prefer not to say anything.

But if you posted your above statements about Medievia without reading the evidence, then by your own reasoning that makes you less professional than the rest of us in this thread. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually agree with you on this point.

[Soleil]

Wow!  Look at all the posts about Medievia!  Well, I guess it was expected considering the same people who used to be around here are still around here.  Same old arguments, same old flames.  It's a shame to see that nothing has changed in the 4-5 years since Medievia has been around here.  It's also a shame to see people harping over issues 10+ years old now.  

It's now 2005 people.  Why can't you move past these irrelevant claims?  Merc beta  was I believe about 28K lines of code.  Medievia today is about 451,000 lines of re-coded C++.  The DIKU license could not hold up in a court of law even if they wanted to do anything, which they don't.  I just dont understand that now, 4-5 years since Kavir made that site with the code comparisons, that you all can still put that link up and think it's anything like the current Medievia code.  Personally, I don't do the coding, but I do know that Medievia has been re-written several times.  

I do want to say this though... Medievia did not STEAL anything - Geez.  Choosing not to follow a ridiculous, irrelevant and ancient license does not equate stealing.

I guess when I contacted Synozeer and he agreed to put Medievia back up on this list that I just assumed the "mud community" had gotten past these really old and really inconsequential issues.  But then again, I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up.  

Have fun with this post as I know you will probably tear it a part piece by piece with your commentary.  I will not be around today as it's Mother's Day  Go tell your mommy you love her and think happy thoughts!

[welcor]

Originally Posted by Choosing not to follow a ridiculous, irrelevant and ancient license does not equate stealing.

Well, yes. It does, actually. Using the code and not following the license (however it is written) constitutes stealing.
Same thing as installing a program and breaking the EULA.
The DIKU license might seem irrelevant to you today, but that's not what we're debating. You broke it, knowing full well that you were stealing. Playing down the severity of the act due to the amount of time passed doesn't make you look better.

No wonder you have been called medthievia on so many boards.

Oh, and the_logos - I guess you do this to get those game links in your sig displayed? All publicity is good publicity, right ?

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (welcor @ May 08 2005,14:57) Originally Posted by Choosing not to follow a ridiculous, irrelevant and ancient license does not equate stealing. Well, yes. It does, actually. Using the code and not following the license (however it is written) constitutes stealing.

It's good to see they've at least dropped the "we're not a Diku derivative" line, and moved on to the "who cares if we don't follow ther licence". That way we can all just agree that they're a bunch of thieves, and hopefully not spam the site with too many flame wars.

[prof1515]

Medievia should be removed and banned once more and the IRE crap should be as well. Liars, thieves, and shameless-self-promoting producers of such sub-standard games only make the MUD community look bad. We're all better off with out that filth.

Take care,

Jason

[Qud]

IRE is, as far as I'm aware, absolutely and completely legitimate.
If they have their own codebase which is made from scratch, and there are no licensing issues, there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to even charge people money for making characters. Keeping money-bought advantages balanced so that regular players aren't massively overpowered is also a good thing.
I don't like the concept of any MUD charging money, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Iron Realms.

Seeing Medthievia here, however, made me quite upset. I don't think they should be featured here, shameless bastard corrupt lying thieves that they are. "So what if we stole the codebase, it was X years ago and we added Y lines of code since"? Go to ####.

[Soleil]

Ahh look at all the animosity!  Such a shame really.  I know I said I wasn't going to respond today, but well, I just gotta!  I just have a few questions..

Firstly, the people whose license we are allegedly breaking don't care at all anymore about this issue, why do you?  The players of our game don't care about this issue, why do you?  The various gaming sites who agree to list Medievia and take Medievia's money don't care about this issue, why do you?  So many of you still hold utter contempt towards us at Medievia.  Why? Why do you care THAT much?  

Secondly, why such contempt towards the larger MUDs that are run as businesses?  We ARE businesses and as such we want to promote the games we run.  We advertise, we promote ourselves on forums such as these, "self-promote" as one of you said, in order to get our games more players.  How is that wrong?  And yes, ALL publicity is just that, publicity.  Every business in the world advertises and self-promotes, why is it supposed to be different in the MUD world?

Also- not a question but a comment- we do not consider ourselves a DIKU derivative.  I know I know you can post and post URLs that explain derivatives up and down but that still isn't going to change the fact that Medievia has been recoded many times.  Yes I know you are going to state that it doesn't matter as long as we started with something we are still something.  Again, I will state, that the Merc code was 28,000 lines of poorly written C.  Medievia today is almost 500,000 lines of C++.  Just those numbers alone should show that Medievia today is NOT Diku or Merc.  

Ok, have at it

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (Soleil @ May 08 2005,17:42) Firstly, the people whose license we are allegedly breaking don't care at all anymore about this issue, why do you?

Don't confuse being unwilling to sue you with not caring. Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt (one of the Diku team) has said that "Vryce was indeed one of the major reasons i stopped contributing to the community, and found other places to spend my energy" - and he's not the only one. Many mud developers have chosen not to contribute to the mud community any more, citing your mud and those like it as the reason.

Originally Posted by The players of our game don't care about this issue, why do you?

Well obviously those who play it don't, or they wouldn't be playing - but many of those who have learned the truth for themselves have since left, including staff members such as Omawarisan (former level 140 Medievia god) who stated "For years I have believed Medievia to be righteous in its claims to be original and free of copyrighted materials (including both the code, and the recent massive work down to remove copyrighted references in zones, monsters, items, etc.). It now appears Medievia is outwardly original and copyright-free, but inwardly I highly, HIGHLY, question the origins of many of lines of code" and Thranz (former Medievia coder) who stated "I left because I didn't want any more of my work (at the code level and the building level) associated with Medievia.com. I don't need code comparisons or audits or God to come down to Earth to know who is telling the truth. The code is DIKU, I know because I *worked* on the code".

Originally Posted by The various gaming sites who agree to list Medievia and take Medievia's money don't care about this issue, why do you?

The various gaming sites who take your money for advertising don't care?! Well gee, what a big surprise!

You want to know why we care? Because we respect the work of others, and their contributions to our hobby - and people like you undermine all of that. "Who cares?" you say - but if it hadn't been for Diku (and Merc) you wouldn't even have had a mud to start from. Now think what you might have had, if you hadn't stopped the Diku team from contributing further to the community. Think what progress might have been made if the Merc team and others had continued developing and releasing their updates.

Originally Posted by So many of you still hold utter contempt towards us at Medievia. Why? Why do you care THAT much?

Because you represent the worst aspects of the mud community.

Originally Posted by Secondly, why such contempt towards the larger MUDs that are run as businesses?

People show contempt towards you not because your mud is run a business, but because it is build on the ripped-off work of others. You've taken someone else's efforts which they gave freely, stripped out the credits, and claimed it as your own - then made a living off it.

Originally Posted by Also- not a question but a comment- we do not consider ourselves a DIKU derivative.

But you are, legally speaking, exactly that.

[Soleil]

Thanks, KaVir, for stating nothing new ... All those quotes have been around for years.  Do you think the Diku people care NOW?

I see that some people still like to live in the past.  So be it.  In the meantime, Medievia is still growing, and growing strong.  Long Live Medievia!

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (Soleil @ May 08 2005,18:45) Thanks, KaVir, for stating nothing new

Nothing new that needed to be stated; an outdated mud, operated by scum who care nothing about the community you damage with your theft. If you didn't want me to reiterate the facts, why even ask?