[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 09:39:33PM -0700, a little birdie told me
that Ben Greear remarked
> 
> 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

I think you'll have a lot of disagreement on this point, from me as well
as other people, but I'll save that flamewar for another time  ;)


> 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.

I think if we're talking about codebases that can be used commercially as
well as 'freely', the GPL becomes a problem itself.  Requiring source
disclosure of all your changes is a burden if you're trying to use those
changes (new features!  new things to do!  new fun stuff!) to distinguish
yourself from 'the rest' and attract people to make a buck.

\begin{flamebait}
BSD-style licensing!
\end{flamebait}




--
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)     |    fullermd at over-yonder.net
Unix Systems Administrator      |    fullermd at futuresouth.com
Specializing in FreeBSD         |    http://www.over-yonder.net/
       "Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within."



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