nergal
staff puppet account
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Post by nergal on Feb 3, 2020 9:56:05 GMT -5
dikumud.com/dikumud-license/*February 3rd, 2020 update: The DikuMUD authors Sebastian Hammer, Hans-Henrik Starfeldt, Katja Nyboe, and Michael Seifert have all agreed to make their Diku MUD work available under the LGPL license. We’ve been unable to get a hold of Tom Madsen, but we feel fairly confident that he would likewise agree to submit his work under LGPL. This replaces the awkwardly-worded DikuMud license that the original creators wrote up in 1990-1991 and affects all MUDs derived from Diku, including Armageddon.
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Jeshin
GDB Superstar
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Post by Jeshin on Feb 3, 2020 10:08:25 GMT -5
I've been saying for ages that non-profit codebases have been holding back the game. I did not know DIKU was the root of the branches though I thought it was SMAUG or something. Does anyone know the actually ROOT BRANCH path of Diku to RPIs?
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kannot
Clueless newb
Posts: 126
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Post by kannot on Feb 6, 2020 3:26:31 GMT -5
Someone translate this.
Does this mean Arm can start making profits off the MUD that it invests into making it better?
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Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516
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Post by Jeshin on Feb 6, 2020 11:49:17 GMT -5
Armageddon cannot profit because it still infringes on the Dark Sun copy right.
It means that games derived from DIKU can profit as long as DIKU is the only license they are held too. So some RPIs are derived from DIKU > SMAUG > RPI. SMAUG has its own license on top of DIKU which means the SMAUG code would not be something you can profit from unless SMAUG also does it.
REALISTICALLY this just gives everyone permission to monetize their codebase. They could do it before because the DIKU license was never enforced except by the community basically throwing rocks and boycotting some games that violated the licenses of different MUD codebases.
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Post by jcarter on Feb 6, 2020 12:12:01 GMT -5
Armageddon cannot profit because it still infringes on the Dark Sun copy right. It means that games derived from DIKU can profit as long as DIKU is the only license they are held too. So some RPIs are derived from DIKU > SMAUG > RPI. SMAUG has its own license on top of DIKU which means the SMAUG code would not be something you can profit from unless SMAUG also does it. REALISTICALLY this just gives everyone permission to monetize their codebase. They could do it before because the DIKU license was never enforced except by the community basically throwing rocks and boycotting some games that violated the licenses of different MUD codebases. yeah I always found it odd how the community viewed an informal document written up by five Danish college students as some ironclad legal document. example: really? 5 danish people are going to sue me for charging $5 to burn DikuMUD to a disk? what amount of money are they going to sue for and under what grounds are they going to claim entitlement to it? that's not how it works. that's not how any of this works. |
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Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516
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Post by Jeshin on Feb 6, 2020 14:10:23 GMT -5
That was 5 dollars from the early 90s that is like 50 bucks today!
EDIT - According to random inflation calculator it is actually 5 dollars to 9.95 dollars today.
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Post by lechuck on Feb 6, 2020 16:13:27 GMT -5
Realistically, the thing that kept DIKU from being monetized was just the fact that nobody was gonna pay money to play a MUD built on some ancient stock code from 1990. Only a tiny corner of the MUD community has been able to succesfully monetize their product--mostly IRE and a few other holdouts. If anyone without an established studio behind it was to start up a MUD today and go "oh btw it costs $10/month to play this", nobody would bother. The DIKU thing was more about the fact that anyone who had any intentions of monetizing their MUD probably wouldn't be building it on DIKU.
I think it would be great if there was room for monetized professional-grade RPIs, but it's not gonna be something that three guys slapped together in a few months. If someone made something with real quality behind it, and there were more than eight swinging dicks online at a time, I'd be down to pay money for it. It just doesn't seem to have been a thing yet. From what I've been able to glean, the monetized MUDs have been either IRE hack&slash crap or projects that never actually launched. If someone wanted to take the codebase that current-day SoI (RIP) is built on, and it had over 50 players online at peak and a more interesting concept than fucking Tolkien, I'd throw $10 at it no problem.
Anyone remember LauraMars? She's working for some IRE thing now, some type of sci-fi MUD that's basically a pay2win semi-RP ordeal. That's the peril of monetization in the MUD genre. When you aren't selling your shit on Steam or in a physical video game store, you have to make all your money off of what amounts to microtransactions. If you've got 200 players paying $10/month, that's an okay living wage for a single individual. Not exactly a solid foundation for a gaming enterprise, yet still a lofty goal by MUD standards. That's why almost none are monetized. It comes with expectations, and it might not be worth trying to live up to those once you open up the hornet's nest that is the paying customer.
I think the fundamentals of the RPI genre are ill-suited for monetization; but if someone found a way to put together qualified and impartial staff, a good game concept and a sizeable playerbase while sticking to the RPI tenets, I'd be down. I just doubt it can be done. Monetization would get rid of one of those three things and then it would no longer be an attractive product. Even if you had a cool game idea and a decent players, someone'll always want to sell proverbial sorcs for $25 and then the whole thing falls apart. Anyone with the resources and managerial expertise to pull it off would be better off trying their hand at actual video games instead of a genre with <1000 global players.
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nergal
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Posts: 46
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Post by nergal on Feb 8, 2020 9:17:50 GMT -5
Mostly I'm curious about this update as it relates to the clearly open source nature of the Diku library, and possibly derivative libraries and any games based off of modifications to Diku (which includes Armageddon, of course). Since I became aware of a great deal of confusion about this change, I decided to post a couple more thoughts about it. But I feel the best information is going to come from an impartial resource that speaks for itself. Obviously this would include the text of the license itself, but since it's steeped in legalese I figured a correct interpretation of the license would be more useful. So here you go: oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/gploss-watch.ac.uk/resources/lgpl |
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nergal
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Post by nergal on Feb 8, 2020 16:24:17 GMT -5
The DikuMUD website has been updated to state the following:
*February 3rd, 2020 update: The DikuMUD authors Sebastian Hammer, Hans-Henrik Starfeldt, Katja Nyboe, and Michael Seifert have all agreed to make their DikuMUD work available under the LGPL license. We’ve been unable to get a hold of Tom Madsen, but we feel fairly confident that he would likewise agree to submit his work under LGPL. This means you can choose yourself if you want to use DikuMUD under the LGPL or the original license. Please note that derivative work isn’t automatically under LGPL. It would need to be re-released by its respective authors.
This obviously changes the open source situation quite a bit for MUDs derived from Diku. I imagine many MUDs will choose to keep the original license if they aren't planning to monetize.
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