[MUD-Dev] Re: Bruce Sterling on Virtual Community goals

[Elis Pomales]

On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, Jon Leonard wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 15, 1998 at 10:47:51PM -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Oct 1998 19:14:54 -0700 
> > Jon Leonard<jleonard at divcom.slimy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, Oct 15, 1998 at 11:24:42AM -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
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> > > [Bruce Sterling's comments about virtual communities being an
> > > This reminds me of Eric S. Raymond's "Homesteading the Noosphere"
> > > http://www.earthspace.net/esr/writings/homesteading/, which
> > > discusses status among open source software developers, and how it
> > > relates to getting software developed.  (The prequel paper is also
> > > well worth looking at:
> > > http://www.earthspace.net/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
> > 
> > Bah!  You're stealing my thunder -- I had it all planned to lead
> > gracelessly into the Raymond mantra and the benefits of cooperateive
> > development via your player base.
> 
> Oops.  :-)
> 
> The other possible lesson that we as a list should be collaborating
> on code rather than reinventing wheels by the truckload.
> 
> I get the impression that many people on the list are writing their
> own servers, often from scratch.  (I am.)  Would anyone be interested
> in collaborating on a base server for experimentation?  There's got
> to be a certain amount of drudgery that we can save each other.
> 
> Even if there isn't interest, figuring out a base feature set would be
> useful, and I'd extract parts of my own server to match.  (I have a fully
> RFC compliant telnet server, which I could disentangle from the rest of my
> code, for example.)
> 
> If there isn't a clear idea of what would be a useful base to extend on,
> that says something very interesting about the future of MUD design.
> 
> At this point I'm envisioning a collection of modules, so that features
> that aren't interesting in a particular context can be ignored.  The
> whole could be under something like the X license or even explicit public
> domain, so that it would be useful for those considering commercial uses
> as well.
> 
> Would anyone use such a thing?  Would there be any benefit over starting
> with something like a Diku base (which I understand some have done).
> 
Well as far as I am concerned I would be highly interested in helping
build an advanced engine under a license that would allow commercial use.
As such that is the only reason that I have started writing from scratch,
most engines explicitly don't allow commercial use. I started way back
when writing an interpretor based mud, very MOO like, but I wrote it in
java, and at the time it was way too slow... so I killed it and have begun
working on a java server, but using pure java. I would really have
prefered a byte-code interpretor written in c and now that I have a job
where I am surrounded by sparc... I might just start doing that... Another
thing I have allways wanted was a coordinate based system, but I have
never been able to figuere out r-trees... sigh.

Elis Pomales

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