[MUD-Dev] Re: My vision for DevMUD

[ApplePiMan at aol.com]

At 11/4/98 7:13 PM J C Lawrence (claw at under.engr.sgi.com) altered the 
fabric of reality by uttering:

>Please note that the GPL does not prohit or even constrain
>commercial use of GPL code.  It __only__ comes into play when the
>GPL derived product is sold or otherwise transfered to others.
>Rendering a __service__ via GPL code does not invoke the infectious
>aspects of the GPL, only trying to sell, trade, give away, or
>otherwise exchange the GPL product itself invokes the GPL.

Right, but one (eventual) pipe-dream I have for my enterprise is to 
publish APIs to my proprietary modules and encourage third party 
development of games to attach to my service (i.e., I'll provide the 
infrastructure [billing, collections, customer service, networking, etc.] 
in exchange for a skim of profits, and third party developers will 
provide content). To do that as a commercial service, I'd not only have 
to provide developers with binaries of my modules, but with binaries of 
(my possibly modified) DevCore as well (they need something to build and 
test on), thus invoking those infectious aspects (as you so aptly put 
it). In that case, I'd be very tempted to fork your effort myself by 
building a core of my own that was DevCore compliant (but *not* DevCore 
itself) and releasing it into the PD, then building my proprietary 
service on that. <For the sarcasm impaired, I'm not serious... =) >

I suppose a variant of a GPL license that allowed free distribution of 
binaries (only) without forcing public release of source code could be 
worked out and would allow for my special case (if list members were 
inclined to do so); but again, is it necessary, and will we *really* be 
gaining anything? I think not...

I don't see the scheme I outlined above as any threat to DevMUD (if 
anything, I would think it would encourage its usage, since people with 
no interest in setting up and running the infrastructure could still 
produce DevMUD game worlds), but I would see a GPL license as a 
*definite* threat to my doing that.

-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>