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This is sad to me, and together with the cryptic remarks of Threshold regarding the law as it pertains to IP it constitutes this sort of culture of fear that pervades the atmosphere for people who want to get into developing muds.
MOO and MUSH codes have for years offered in game coding functionality. I do not know what the state of their licensing is, but I know I hear a lot less about them than I do Diku, and that they appear to offer much broader features, though they admitedly require a lot more of the prospective builder than Diku or Lp would.
No one needs to get all defeatist just because a rather unique attempt to publicly license a work met with a certain amount of failure. IP law may be complex, but it's not so far beyond the lay person that they can't get into the business of mud design and coding without taking on a legal staffer just to protect general copyright. Apache and GPL appear to be viable alternatives for people who want to release their code publicly. I think the secret is not to try to use a copyright license as a prybar to control things other than how your code is copied and distributed. If you want protection on how it is used after it is out of your hands, that's where things appear to get complex, but there's no real reason to worry about that is there, if your intention is to release something for free use?
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