[DGD] The future of DGD

[Felix A. Croes]

I have worked on DGDMP for a long time.  In 1997, after joining the
MUD-Dev mailing list, I realized that DGD's LPC runtime would be an
extremely good fit for the parallel execution scheme that was being
discussed there.  In 2002, I forked off DGDMP as a separate project.

>From the start, it has been my intention to release the source code once
it was sufficiently stable, the same as I've done with DGD.  That would
be now, with the big architectural change of version 1.1.21 completed.
However, the internet today is a different place.  Enforcing DGD's
license terms, which has always been problematic, is now completely
infeasible in some areas.  It is because of this that I have changed my
plans, and will not be releasing the source code for DGDMP.

I will continue to release binaries that are compiled for 32 bits and
are limited to 64K objects and 255 users, which can be used without
restriction.  64 bit binaries that can handle more objects and users
will be available to licensees.

Meanwhile, I have no further plans for DGD, other than to track bugfixes
and compatibility changes from DGDMP.  I have therefore decided to release
it under an Open Source license.  At the suggestion of Christopher Allen,
I have created an open source repository, hosted at the link below:

    http://code.google.com/p/dgd-osr/

Bart van Leeuwen has graciously consented to act as project master.  My
own role will be mainly to import changes from DGDMP and commit them to
the "baseline" branch.

Among the last few changes I made, before I committed the source code to
the open source repository, are the removal of escape character filtering --
the awful telnet protocol remains depressingly popular for mud clients --
and letting the documentation reflect that DGD stands for "Dworkin's Game
Driver," the original, and ultimately my preferred reading.

Please note that only DGD version 1.4 is released under the new license.
To get the open source goodness, upgrade!

Regards,
Felix Croes