[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]

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]

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

[KaVir]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[the_logos]

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]

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]

You are just as aware as everyone else on the [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]