[MUD-Dev] Cash for Lawsuits

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2000 at 08:47:29AM -0600 I heard the voice of
Patrick Dughi, and lo! it spake thus:
>
> derivitive of Diku.  The Diku license specifically prohibits the owner
> (Vryce in this case) from accepting money for any reason specific to
> the mud, including charity, server maintainence, and of course any
> sort of subscription, pay-to-play, or pay-for-perks model.
> 
> In short, if any money comes from a player and ends up with the owner
> for any reason, you are breaking the license (unless you send it
> back).

I'm not clear that this is actually so.
Quoting the appropriate section:
---
   You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in
   any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for
   distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge
   for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.
---

The distinguishing phrase is 'You may under no circumstances make
profit'.  On the one hand, if you simply sink all the monies sent to you
into the game (server hardware, external code contracts, colo/bandwidth
fees, etc), it can be argued that you did not make profit.  On another
tack, if all money is payed to a company which you do not control or own,
then you still made no profit from it.  I'm sure more weasels could be
made around this, and as someone else already said, the lack of a
specification of exactly who 'You' refers to is a bit of a weakness.
Licenses written in the second person scare me    :)



--
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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