Misleading questions? Your quote from one of the diku authors is meaningless unless it can be corroborated and presented in a complete manner. Even then we'd probably see the questions were misleading, as the crucial term of the contract, "profit", was not mentioned in your quotes.

And those quotes are the basis for practically every posting against rewarding in-game donations. Just partial extracts of answers when we don't even know what the questions were.

I provided the full questions and answers, to a scenario that is very similar to that of Aardwolf. I cannot see how the quotes could have made the situation any clearer (and yes, the did include "profit") - but if you believe I made them up, you are of course free to contact the Diku team yourself and ask their opinion.

Are the full quotes still up somewhere?

Mainly suggesting you are mis-representing the quotes.  But anything's possible as the full exchange hasn't been posted that I have seen.  Granted I can't stand most of these ludicrous arguments and don't read everything...

I will start off by admitting this is my first post and that I am an Aardwolf player, so if you want to you can completely ignore me.

I have been following this thread for a while now and one thing has been troubling me.  Has the licence been changed to reflect the supposed intent of the Diku team?  Alternatively, does it now include the phrase "postings on the TopMudSites.com discussion database are legally binding" or words to that effect?

If not then all the discussion on here is pretty much meaningless, isn't it?

As someone who runs an LP Mud and does neither charge any money for anything nor accepts donations, I do not really have any interest in interpreting the DIKU license one way or another, but after reading through many of the related threads, though, I think you can summarize the whole thing pretty easily:

"Is it legal to accept donations in exchange for in-game benefits as long as you do not make any profit (revenues after subtracting costs)?" - Possible, since the DIKU license is extremely poorly worded in that matter.

"Is it RIGHT to accept donations as stated above?" - No, because Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt stated that it was not the DIKU-team's intention to allow that kind of thing; everyone who runs a DIKU-derivative profits from the work he and his friends invested many years ago and therefore should respect their opinion in that matter.

As we all know, legal does not automatically mean right and vice versa. Additionally, I'm not a lawyer, so I have no clue what would happen in a court. But that's the conclusion I have as someone unbiased when watching the whole discussion.

I am not. They are extremely clear, and I have spoken to the Diku team at considerable length about this issue. I have posted the quotes at least twice now, include once in direct response to your request to read them. If you're not going to read them here, where should I post them that you won't conveniently forget next time?

It mentions profit "in any possible way". Gross profit is a "possible way". This point has been covered again and again and again. Please at least have the good manners to read the thread before posting.

I appreciate the support of people both on/off Aardwolf here, but have read several statements giving the implication that someone is 'speaking on my behalf' when in fact they are not. For example, I don't recall ever describing our listing on TMS as an 'experiment'.

Nothing new is going to be said here -- if the Aardwolf folks really want to help, then do so by reading the whole thread and then staying out of it, or even better, help with testing of the new codebase as it is developed.

In the meantime, ownership of the license itself is not clear. DIKU university don't care enough to even acknowledge four emails sent over a period of several weeks questioning intellectual property of university projects. The DIKU coders have been claiming "violation" for close on 10 years now at Medievia and if KaVir's site is authentic, even have identical comments in source code to prove it, yet have made no claim on their works. Then there is the whole situation of this "clarification" of intentions -- intentions can have a tendency to change scope a little once you release a commercial product competing with your formerly free version.

If I had seen those intentions years ago, would I have let Aardwolf grow to the point it did? Probably not. I can't go back in time now though - only move forward with the new code. If the whole situation 'discourages' people from releasing code that is unfortunate, one would hope it would instead encourage them to write better licenses and make their intentions crystal clear from the start.

Nope. Although if Aardwolf is a "hobby" rather than a "business", it will also have to pay tax on all of its income. Also, after three years of yielding an income, a hobby is considered a business and you are required to report it as self-employment income. How long did you say Aardwolf had been selling in-game gear, again?

Not at all. Although Aardwolf is hardly the first mud to jump into first position so quickly, it was the first mud for quite a while that had managed to knock Achaea from that spot. You'll notice that most of us were cheering it on (even the owner of Achaea) until someone pointed out that it was violating the license. What we are "irritated" by is people who flaunt mud licenses, thus discouraging other mud developers for contributing back into the community.

I am not crying "Ban Aardwolf", I am simply pointing out that they are violating the Diku license. And FYI, Medievia was also banned for violating the license.

"Ownership of the license"? Surely you mean ownership of copyright? Diku is registered with the US Copyright office, so I'm not sure how much clearer ownership could be...

So um, does that mean I get to have sex with Kastagaar's brain? Pretty please? With sugar and a cherry on top? Oh wait - skip the cherry. I lost that to mudsex years ago <cough>

Quite obviously because the vast majority of MUDs nowadays are DIKUratives of one brand or another, while there are just a handful or two of other major code family MUDs left.

And on the specific matter of LP, this is additionally due to the fact that there are LP implementations which do allow commercial usage. Which has tremendously helped clear matters, as those who wish to make a profit have means and ways to do so without recoding a full MUD from scratch.

Finally, because the actually only instance of alleged license violation in the LP world I'm aware of (not that I have exhaustive knowledge, mind you) has supposedly been resolved between the copyright holder and the alleged violator, and no credible evidence to the contrary has ever surfaced - Something quite different from the DIKU situation where the copyright holders have, in the past, and on several occasions, spoken out clearly against certain types of violators.

The DIKUMud licence uses the compound verb "make profit"*, not the noun "profit".


*with adverbial construct, "in any possibly way", to reiterate.

Just a question to Kavir I think a lot of people are interested in.

Is Aardwolf going to get banned?

Reasons I ask is.....
1. Kavir claims he supports the intentions of copyright holders. In the past this has meant banning copyright violaters from the website. Has the amount of support changed over the years? Instead has Kavir decided to merely argue the DIKU maker's point and let copyright violators remain on the site?

2. If some violators are allowed to stay, shouldn't all violaters be allowed to stay?

After all, I could make a mud, join TMS, break the copyright, then once I get caught claim I'm making a new codebase from scratch (and/or stall for a few extra months and still be listed and still get money, with the possible end result of having a new codebase).

It has nothing to do with 'getting caught'. The new codebase was planned and in development long before Aardwolf was listed on TMS. Many people can confirm this (of course, they're all Aardwolf players, so you won't believe a word they say anyway right?).  The original project was actually started in 1999 in Java and shelved due to lack of time. It was revived earlier this year and after hitting a wall with Java performance (mostly related to bugs in the native ZLIB implementation and lack of performance of a 100% Java ZLIB), work began on moving to C.

Once again, there are daily backups showing code progression, CVS logs and full source code available for review by an independant third party under NDA.  Why is this necessary? Because people like you have apparently already decided ahead of time what the new code will and will not be.

Attack us for rewarding donations during a limited time period a couple of times a year if you believe that is wrong, but please don't attack us for something you speculate we might do in the future.

Thank you.

I'm a moderator for two of the discussion forums, not the board owner - you'd have to speak to Synozeer about that.

On one occasion - and that was a "big fish", which violated all aspects of the license. It also took a huge amount of work to gather all the evidence together so that I could present it to Synozeer.

Most are clear-cut cases, which can be cleared up quickly enough. Others, such as this one, take time and effort - something which I'd rather spend on my own mud.

I'm not entierly sure, but I don't think it is really up to kavir wether a site is banned from TMS or not...

I do not blame the TMS staff either to keep them listed currently. They get money from it, and as it has been said, aardwolf is not doing anything legally wrong, until the matter has been through a court of law...?

However, if the "mud community" and its members got together and actually asked sites like TMS to remove a listing like aardwolf, they probably will.

Now, instead of them being banned from the list right now, i would personally see a case and get some VALID information wether or not they are actually breaking a licence before any action is taken. And if they are not, you'll get a vote from me aardwolf!

Main Entry: 2profit
Date: 14th century
intransitive senses
1 : to be of service or advantage : AVAIL
2 : to derive benefit : GAIN
3 : to make a profit
transitive senses : to be of service to : BENEFIT

This is the verb form of profit. If you mean to say that this is the word the DikuTeam intended to use, then every single mud derived form their source code is in violation. If their mud is listed in TMS or any other site, they are profiting from such sites because they are GAINING new players. Gain = Profit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Amazingly enough you obviously haven't read any of the forums, go take a quick refresher. Quite a few who were in the original topic have nothing (truly, unless you go off on paranoid tangents) to win from weakening the license.

Much the troll we are, hmm? You believe you are actually helping any cause? Regardless, to your points. Of course we aren't discussing morals, we are in a LEGAL ISSUES forum, to discuss the legality of an item, not the morality.

I have been questioned about my motives and responded, again, refer yourself to the other thread and do some homework.

Alright, let's bring it down a level then.

1. You are in a Legal Issues Forum on a MUD board.
2. The legality of a license is being discussed.
3. Blathering, Whining, Zealotry, etc. is all pointless as the issue has never been to court.

Alastair, while I understand that the reading of this current thread (as presented in your outline) has been quite ludicrous, it does not change the fact that this is a legal forum. People may be disgusted all they want, but in reality legality over-rules "spirit" when concerning contracts/licenses, but continue mud-slinging until it goes to court. If nothing else, it provides for a fun read and a neat way to waste time.

-----

It seems to me that many people are going to extremes to break down the license into as many sub-levels as they can to examine them. I'm sorry, but that is not how things will work. Unlike the other thread, this one has gone downhill with a bunch of zealots posting ridiculous drivel.

The license is WEAK, no one needs to TRY to weaken it. The license would probably not hold up to court scrutiny, and if it did would more than likely be construed as "non-commercial" usage only. Pretending that hidden within the texts of the license are various implied conditions is quite another stretch, but coupled with posts of later dates it paints their intent as it stands now. The question is, as with any license, was it readily noticeable that the intent of the implied condition was present at the time of creation of the license. Using the Officious bystander test would be the only sure way of doing this, anybody volunteer to conduct it? Would we believe you? So again we would have to go to a court to define the implied conditions.

My viewpoint:

The DIKUMud software, while in wide usage, is still a dogged out codebase, the reason it received such wide popularity is due to the fact that it facilitated stock set-ups. While other mud servers/libs did much to prevent this (i.e. George Reese and pulling the Nightmare codebase, due to stock LP's) or were hard to program/create (CoolMud, MOO, LP) a game in. Of course you could download LIBS for LP or CORES for Cool/Moo/etc they were still harder to get accustomed to.

I fail to see why anyone would really want to start a commercial DIKU (or deriv) mud, unless they made extensive modifications to it, at which point they might as well have written their own codebase. As a player I wouldn't play a $Diku.

Accepting donations in my book is fine, giving in-game rewards for donation.. while it may break the "spirit" of the license, it is still debateable whether it breaks the license itself.

Kavir, on Gross-Profit:
In the examples given, we are using a mud that sells in-game items for real money. I'm still not sure this would apply to the situation, but as we saw the final outcome that determines gross profit is "Net Receipts - Cost of Goods Sold", i'm convinced that the mud could set a standard rate on coding, maybe based off of regional contract programming rates and charge at (Custom Coding Costs * Amt. Time of Coding = Cost of Item) which in the end if balanced would set their gross profits to 0.


Opinionated Note: For general knowledge, arguing/debating the license shouldn't weaken it unless it is proven wrong. Quite the reverse actually, the license as it stands is in a state where it would have to go to court to be weakened, though a strong community stands behind the intent of it. Even, hypothetically, if it does go to court it still will be able to be re-written.

John: No, Alastair just attacks at random =)

Sinuhe: Interesting viewpoint on free mud vs. commercial mud, care to start another thread about it?

Aardwolf does not make a profit in the sense that the head coder keeps even a single dollar for himself, all of the money raised to through donations are put back into the MUD, keeping our T1 going and increasing the player base through advertising. Lasher has always been very honest in the past, and continues to do so now. There has never been any signal from the imm staff that Aardwolf has a desire to become a pay-to-play MUD. You make it sound as if there is an evil plot running behind the scenes here, while all i see is a MUD assuring continuation and current standard with a method which has worked for years now. Of course i can always be wrong. I wonder which imm is the Dr. Evil then.......

That's not selling a product, that's selling a service. From the IRS link:

Businesses that sell services.
You do not have to figure the cost of goods sold if the sale of merchandise is not an income-producing factor for your business. Your gross profit is the same as your net receipts (gross receipts minus any refunds, rebates, or other allowances). Most professions and businesses that sell services rather than products can figure gross profit directly from net receipts in this way.

Although true, you'll notice the 'most professions and businesses'.  In this case, an argument could be made that the time spent building an item could be considered cost of sales.  However, since Aardwolf has already said they only provide items that can be found in the game, trying to charge the 5 seconds it takes to invoke an item and give it to a player as cost of sales would require them to be paying their builders to invoke these objects.  This would also apply to creating new items.  The difference between the revenue you make from giving the item and the salary of the builder who gave the item would go towards gross profit.

DV

Salary is a type of expense - specifically a "controllable expense" (or "variable expense"). It is applied after gross profit has been calculated.

That is a part of criminal law, not civil law.

IMO, _what_ Aardwolf does with its money isn't the least bit our concern. It's how he gets it which matters.

Whether he pays for his mud with the donations or snickers all the way to the piggy bank is between him and his players.