[DGD] Re: Pros/Cons of Releasing Mudlibs

[Dan Root]

On Mon, May 11, 1998 at 10:21:26AM -0500, Jason Cone wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I've been having doubts of late as to whether or not I'd really like to
> release CornerStone's mudlib source (CSLib).  I'm currently opposed to it,
> but have been going back and forth on it for some time now.  Anyway, here
> are my reasons for either course of actions - I'd like to get some reactions
> to them.
> 
> Pros to Releasing
> =================
> * You get to contribute to something much greater than just your MUD.
> * DGD is severely lacking in functional, usable, and game-oriented mudlibs.
> * You could potentially benefit from those people that apply new
> functionality to your source.
> * Much bigger "pool" to draw from as far as tracking bugs and such goes.

You've got most of the benefits down pretty well.

> Cons to Releasing
> =================
> * Attention is focused to the development of the lib rather than the
> development of the MUD.
> * You lose all functional uniqueness (potentially numerous clones of your
> MUD).
> * Open to subjective public criticism on design paradigms (not really a
> problem, just an annoyance).

I'll comment on these.

Lib vs MUD -  IMO, not an issue.  If you put one up and advertise
it, people will log in.  More importantly players will log in.
Players as a whole (not all, but most) don't care about the lib in
and of itself.  They want functionality and a reasonable environment
to play in.  Collectively they will attempt to force (or suggest)
improvements on both the mud (areas, puzzles, monsters) and the
library itself (features, commands, abilities).   And often times
what they want is very different than you might have imagined.

Uniqueness - I'm mixed on this one.  This touches on the whole
Stock vs Custom issue that seems to infest the r.g.m.* hierarchy
from time to time.  If you distributed a library with no predefined
'areas' then you can largely avoid this.  The other side of this
comes down to, is it 'bad' to be recognizable in terms of the feel
of the library?  For players it's a good thing, since familiar is
comfortable as a rule.  

Annoyance - Thick skin is good. :)

> Anyway, those are the major issues that I'm facing in trying to make a
> decision.  The main issues that it comes down to for me personally are that
> I <really> want to provide a functional, usable, robust, and game-oriented
> mudlib for DGD.  I really want to do that.  What I don't want to happen,
> however, is to have 100 other MUDs out there look exactly like mine as far
> as look and feel.  There are some fairly original/not-so-common things that
> we're doing that would be easy to point out in those MUDs that are using our
> mudlib.  I also don't want to be continually servicing requests for changes,
> etc. at the cost of neglecting my own MUD's design.  I know this can be
> solved via delegation and what not, but it's still an issue for me.

I think you shouldn't worry about this.  If you put reasonable
terms on the usage agreements and don't distribute a large prebuilt
area, then it'll be difficult to come up with 100 identical MUDs
in any fashion.

Food for thought and some personal opinion:

What is you *real* goal?   If it's to make a useful set of software
that would form the starting point of a particular game, then why
not release it?  Unless you're trying to stay ahead of "the
competition", what does keeping your library private do for you?

I never understood why many individual game servers don't release
their custom libraries.  There's a large enough market in terms of
players to support a large number of muds, and being unique is a
bonus, but your particular world and player base is a *FAR* greater
draw than any feature in your library.  I've played all sorts of
muds, and to date my favorites have been a (*gasp*) Diku, and a
MUCK, both because the players involved were friendly and interesting
and the admins were commited to the mud.  More than anything that
atmosphere is what defines a mud on all levels, not what server or
library it's running on.

To that end, I've never seen a post or comment to the effect of 'I
love MumbleMUD, they've got the best language parser around, I can
type "get 42nd mumble from the third brown bag in the back room of
the seediest city"'.  Instead I see, 'ThisOtherMUD is great, the
people are really friendly and the admins are always willing to
help out'.  Given that sort of feedback, and the general popuarity
of things like MUSH and MUCK which have *terrible* features compared
to most LP's or even Diku-types, I have to believe that a good
world and good players is a lot more important.

The only situation where I personally would be concerned with
releasing my source is if it were such a hack I was embarrassed of
it's quality.  I would, however, want to strip out the 'world' in
anything I released to prevent lazy people from putting up a clone
of my personal server.

The upside of releasing (again, IMO) is the fact that people will
go out of their way to add to it and track down bugs if you encourage
them.  Look at the Linux kernel, Linus is a good programmer, but
he is even better at getting people to do work for (and with) him.

For more on this see Eric Raymond's paper at:

<URL:http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/>

which I highly recommended reading for anyone doing a large software
project, as are the documents on the Open Source pages,

<URL:http://www.opensource.org>


Enough rambling for now (and yes, I also want to see you release)

	-DaR
-- 
Dan Root - dar at thekeep.org



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