[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Ben Greear]

"Travis S. Casey" wrote:

> What other reasons can there be that would require not the freedom to
> choose another codebase, but forcing *everyone* to not use those
> codebases?  Personally, I can't think of *any* good reason why someone who
> wants to use those codebases should be prevented from doing so.

I agree that people should use whatever suits their purpose, but I do
think it would be nice if there were some stronger code-bases that were
open source.  It's quite hard to write a MUD, and much
harder to write a good one.  However, it should be much easier to modify
an existing one (if it was well written and documented, and free
from legal restrictions).

My personal opinion (and I have been living in a cave of my own
construction for several years) is that text based MUDS are in
a decline, and have been for years, even as the rest of the NET
has expanded.  Although I do not know the answer, I wonder if the
huge number of forks in the MUD tree is part of this decline.  Because
advances are not shared back into the community, I believe much effort
is wasted on the mundane, where as a GPL type license seems to keep
branching to a minimum and maximize the collective efforts of many.

However, from personal experience, the GPL is not a magic bullet.  I
have released Scry and it's client under the GPL for over a year now,
and though there have been many downloads, and I know ppl are running
the server, at least on their own machine to see how it works, I have
had little in the way of patches offered from the field.  On the other
hand, many people do comment that they really do like that it's under
the GPL, and several coders have joined my own server project and have
contributed some useful code.

It was also interesting to see how the MUD-DEV project burned so bright,
but flamed out so quickly.  Too many indians, not enough chiefs, no
benevolent dictator, and I think the fact that so few of us really want
to work for others when we could implement our own thing killed it.
We as a mud-developer community just seem too set in our ways, busy,
or otherwise introverted to be able to collaborate on a meaningfull
project.  However, don't think I'm trying to preach:  I know I wouldn't
want to work on any server but my own either :)

Enjoy,
Ben
 
--
Ben Greear (greear at cyberhighway.net)  http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear 
Author of ScryMUD:  scry.wanfear.com 4444        (Released under GPL)
http://scry.wanfear.com



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