[MUD-Dev] Re: My vision for DevMUD

[ApplePiMan at aol.com]

At 11/3/98 11:48 PM Hal Black (hal at moos.ml.org) altered the fabric of 
reality by uttering:

>WRT ApplePiMan's concern about a license "locking up": if a product is
>distributed under a free license...  Then you have it under a free license.
>To the best of my knowledge, once something is out there with a free license,
>that license can't be retroactively revoked.  (Ask your corporate lawyer to 
>be sure) Future editions of the product and any bugfixes done by the 
>copyright
>owner can include more restrictive licenses of which you don't get the 
>benefit.
>But how is that different from your company creating their own derivative 
>work
>from PD source code and not sharing it with others?

Hmm... that may well be God's Honest Truth, but I wouldn't count on it 
without running it by God's lawyer first. =) And it wouldn't keep the 
licensor from trying to get an injunction against me and testing it in 
the courts if they just wanted to be nasty. With PD, Uncle Sam (here in 
the US) would protect my right to continue using the version I had.

I won't fight majority will on this (I'll shut up after this post), but 
it seems to me that if all we're seeking to protect here is credit to the 
original authors we're *still* better off with PD. As I said before, the 
unscrupulous won't credit authors if they don't want to just because a 
license tells them they must, and the scrupulous will do it anyway. Any 
"legit" enterprise (commercial *or* private) would be more than happy to 
credit original authors without having to be forced into it (a simple 
request will do).

-Rick.


---------------------------------------------------------
Rick Buck, President and CEO  <mailto:rlb at big-i.com>
Beyond Infinity Games, Inc.
See you in The Metaverse! <http://www.big-i.com>