[DGD] Software Licenses

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Felix A. Croes wrote:
> Noah Lee Gibbs <angelbob at monkeyspeak.com> wrote:
> > I'm mostly curious what software licensing people think would be best
> > for growing the DGD community.
> >   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.

> It is quite normal for companies to be using software components with
> different licenses.

Melville is available on basically the terms Noah suggests; all
noncommercial use is allowed, for a commercial license, contact me.
I've only been contacted once in seven years and it didn't go anywhere.
Partly this is due to the nature of Melville. It's not a lot of code,
anyone who's good enough to run a commercially viable mud could
create something similar quickly enough, and I've never imagined
that commercial licenses for Melville would be anything other than
token payments.

I don't see any reason why one should -not- make a commercial
option available, although I think noncommercial use should
be the standard. Anyone who wants commercial use can easily
send an email; anyone who does not want that can easily do
nothing. Certainly commercial use and noncommercial use should
be on different terms (paying only for the former). The price
of commercial licenses can be left to the market, but I don't
imagine mudlib licenses being very expensive.

My views on this matter, however, spring more from a sense of
tradition than out of any real sense of optimality.

Steve



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