[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Adam Wiggins]

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Mik Clarke wrote:
> "Ilya, Game Commandos" wrote:
> > 2 - I know of far too many people who quit the admin/imp side of
> >      mudding but wouldn't have if they might have been able at least
> >      to ask for donations, or possibly charge a small fee.
> 
> Well, CthulhuMud is a distant Diku descendent (it still carries the
> license, but hybrid with the GPL license).  I would read the license
> as not being allow to use it to make a profit through the sale of
> access to the Mud or through the sale of the code base.  With a
> comercial mud host charging $20-$40 a month, donations are entirely
> reasonable from my point of view.  Whether this donation comes from
> the imp or the players is fairly irrelevent.  Small fees would have
> to be small (probably no more than a dollars or two a year).  I also
> don't have a problem with imbedded advertizing and web links 
> (especially as it will, when I can find a suitable client, acquire
> a 'pop web page' capability).  To some extent most muds should be
> viewed as charities rather than comercial ventures.

For what it's worth, Arctic (which is based on stock diku) dealt with
this in an interesting way.  They were going through some growing pains
due to too small of a system (mainly RAM, I think) as the player base
started to get large enough that they were supporting several hundred
players at a time.  Rather than ask for donations, they ran a t-shirt
drive.  They printed up some reasonably nice "Arctic MUD" t-shirts for
around $10 a piece, then sold them to players for $20 a piece.  I believe
they raised much more than they expected to, enough to buy an whole new
system with bucketloads of RAM.  (This was about five years ago when
computers actually cost a decent amount of money, unlike now...)

I thought that this was a pretty good solution...

Adam W.





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