TbaMud license change

As some of you may be aware, the CircleMUD code has been relicensed under LGPL.

We are currently in the process of doing the same to the tbaMUD code.

But we need your help, the contributors over time, to let us know that you are ok with this.

A lot of the snippets we've added to the code base over time, has had no license terms, neither given outright or implied. We could just assume they were public domain, but I think the correct way to interpret them is to assume they follow the same license given by the original code, the CircleMUD license, unless otherwise stated.

So, please leave a comment on this post if you've contributed, letting us know that you're ok with changing the license for your intellectual property to the LGPL. Read more about it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License

The switch to LGPL means very little for you as a contributor to tbaMUD.

It matters a great deal for you as a user of the code base.

You are not required to expose your own code or content.

You can use your code for more things (specifically, the old license prohibit "any monetary gain", including donations to pay for servers, which has been a sore point with many DIKU and CIRCLE muds for many years).

Any snippets you put up on sites like this or on mailing lists will be LGPL unless you specify a more strict license (just like it's circle license today). Again, this means that others can use them in their own code bases with no problems.

For those of us who have been around for a while, the circle license has been somewhat of a limitation to the use of the circle derived mud code bases in larger projects. We've been limited by the wording of the license. A switch to a more general, open source, license like the LGPL has been a wish for a long time now.

I think I read somewhere that, to a builder, this means that the areas will now become available for people to use in other bases than TBA since all parts of TBA will become open license. I don't know if this is true but if anybody wants stuff I write and are willing to keep my name on it and can figure out how it works enough to change it into another base, that's fine with me. Of course, chances are they'd do it no matter how TBA is licensed.

This is actually only somewhat correct. There currently isn't any limit to taking an area from the mud distribution and plugging it into another mud. It's not even hard to do.

The change is that currently, if you do that, you can't make any monetary gain. The current license is based on the former DikuMUD license :

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.

This means that it's not an open source license. Now we finally have a chance (because the DikuMUD license changed and the CircleMUD license changed after that) to make it - real - open source I think we should take it.

Yes, this means someone may take your area and use it on a mud. Has that not been the purpose all along? Now, though, they may be able to get donations to run the servers. To be frank, I hardly think any MUD is now popular enough to garner a higher return than that.

thomas wrote: This means that it's not an open source license.

In case anyone wondered - this line in the definition of Open Source Software is not covered by the old license.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

LGPL means that if you convey an application based on LGPL license, you must expose the source code. In this context, convey means letting other people have your binaries. So we at tbaMUD feel this one. It is what we want.

However, the requirement does not extend to the case where your users are connecting to your code via a network. So your 'fantastic super lucrative mud server' would be safe as long as you are not selling it. And then, you'd only need to give the source to the people you're selling it to.

Actually, the GNU Affero General Public License (commonly called the AGPL) has this requirement. This is why we are not adapting that one.

Indeed, we made a push for it. However, we struggled to get in touch with the source code authors (who we were focusing on). The initiative has slowed somewhat - I'm busy at work, and I think the same goes for Rumble.

DG scripts isn't related to the Death Gate book cycle AT ALL. There's no mention of characters, places, setting or anything in the code. This is an example of overthinking it ;) While the setting in the actual mud they were originally developed for might be different, the script code has nothing to do with that setting.

Sharing a couple of letters in a title is not enough to make a claim of ownership or to have any say over distribution. Or I'd be a millionaire, since my last name has a couple of letters also found in Apple, inc.

And actually, that's one of the patches where we have been in touch with the author and gotten a positive response.