[DGD] Software Licenses

[Noah Lee Gibbs]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Felix A. Croes wrote:
> It is quite normal for companies to be using software components with
> different licenses.

  Yes.  But each one adds overhead.  I work for Palm, and I've worked on
licensed code (our FAT filesystem, for instance), and there are a number
of aspects of the license agreement that are painful.  Companies do so,
but they do it cautiously and prefer not to at all.  That's good judgement
on their part if my experience is typical.
  So if the company wanted to license DGD, then license a separate base
MUDLib, then license a couple of other components in addition (Geir Harald
Hansen's objectd, for instance), that would be inconvenient.

> I see no objection to anyone writing a commercially
> usable mudlib, as long as they keep in mind that anyone who can afford
> an expensive commercial license can probably also afford to write a
> basic mudlib, especially if starting with the kernel library.  You have
> to be as confident about your mudlib as I am of selling expensive DGD
> licenses.

  Naturally.  I'm assuming that's what Skotos did since I'm not seeing
stuff comparable to theirs available for free :-)  I'm not suggesting that
I'd be likely to get any takers on *my* MUDLib any time soon...

> >   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.
> 
> This isn't quite correct.  The source for DGD is available, and may be
> distributed, but a real Open Source license requires no restrictions on
> commercial use.

  Right.  Which is why I say the server source is "already available", not
"Open Source".  I guess the MUDLib couldn't be technically Open Source
unless it could be distributed as a binary.  Maybe as a state dump?
  But no, I just meant that Open Source licenses fail to address the needs
of a MUDLib since the binary form is almost never distributed anyway.
For something in the same spirit, perhaps an "Open MUD License" could
require that any player of the MUD be able to download the MUDLib source
code from a web site.  That's what CthulhuMUD does, though I don't think
it's required by their license.  They're not DGD-based, of course.
  A license doing that would guarantee that anybody who used the MUDLib
and added new features had to contribute them back to the community, like
the GPL does with applications.

-- 
angelbob at monkeyspeak.com
See my page of DGD documentation at
"http://www.angelbob.com/projects/DGD_Page.html"
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