[DGD] Software Licenses

[Noah Lee Gibbs]

  This is something I've been pondering for awhile.  I'm curious what
other people think (valid responses would include:  "I think this is
off-topic and should be discussed elsewhere).  I'm mostly curious what
software licensing people think would be best for growing the DGD
community.  As a secondary effect, I'd love to use a license that makes
mine the most popular DGD MUDLib ever :-P

  DGD itself is available only for noncommercial use unless the
potential commercial user purchases an expensive license.  Should
freely-available libs then basically mandate noncommercial use?  Having
every library be free for noncommercial use but require contacting the
author for commercial use turns any attempt to use DGD commercially into a
"build it yourself" endeavor or a minefield, so it comes out the same
either way, really.  The alternative would be to have the MUDLibs allow
commercial use so only a DGD server license would be necessary.  But would
that bother hobbyist developers?

  On a related topic, the GPL and similar Open Source licenses are a poor
fit for MUDs since there are so few people that use the binaries.  For a
true Open Source style license for MUDs, should every MUD user have to be
able to get a copy of the MUDLib source, like CthulhuMUD does?  The server
source, naturally, is already available.

-- 
angelbob at monkeyspeak.com
See my page of DGD documentation at
"http://www.angelbob.com/projects/DGD_Page.html"
If you post to the DGD list, you may see yourself there!

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