[DGD] Idea for copyrighted yet publicly usable mudlibs

[Steve Wooster]

    You know how the people who wrote the DIKU code had a ton of people 
use their mudlib but not give credit for it? It occurred to me that 
releasing a mudlib via DGD statedumps maybe provide a reasonable 
solution for that, allowing you to make it difficult for the average joe 
to alter core sections of your mudlib. You could make something like the 
kernal-lib where there's a certain core/kernal that can't be touched by 
normal code, and make it so that upon connection, some message like 
"FoobarLIB v1.23 created by John Smith." is displayed to the user 
regardless of what the mudlib code says.

Some possible pitfalls:

This assumes that connections would be opened via telnet... a copyright 
message could screw up other protocols, preventing your mudlib from 
using them.

Nobody's perfect, so your mudlib would need updates/patches. You could 
make it so that the core code can load patch files and alter its own 
code. To prevent people from using the patching ability to alter core 
code, you could make your code check digital signatures for any patches.

Somebody who knows what they're doing could still bypass all your 
"security". Perhaps they could alter the mud's config-file to use 
different driver/auto objects. Or they could recompile DGD to add a copy 
of find_object() under a new name. Or if they really wanted to get 
technical, they could alter the statedump. Still, I imagine the sorts of 
people who know how to do that could write their own mudlib just fine... 
though I guess they could release a "cracked" version of the mudlib to 
the general public.

Heh, I guess it's probably more work than it's worth, and easier just to 
release the mudlib as public domain. Still, for credit-seeking people, 
this might be viable.

-Steve Wooster