[DGD] Software Licenses

[Kris Van Hees]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 02:13:20AM -0800, Noah Lee Gibbs wrote:
>   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.

I may be wrong (since it has been a while since I muddled into the realm of
license agreements), but open source licenses (including the GPL) do not "make"
people contribute new features back to the community per-se.  They usually do
prevent you from distributing a derivative under a non-open source license.
But I do not believe I have seen open source licenses that explicitly state
you have to contribute a derivative even if you have no plans to release that
derivative at all.  E.g. if you modify an open source program for your own
purposes and use that modified version, there is no requirement that you make
those modifications available to anyone.  Whether you might benefit from making
them available as a contribution is a different matter :)

With mudlibs and even drivers it might be more common that changes are made for
a particular MUD without them being contributed to the community, since the
MUDs that seem to survive the longest seem to be the ones that do not run on a
standard, unmodified mudlib.  Often the identity of MUDs has been in the local
modifications (and often the original mudlib is barely recognizable).

	Kris
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