Yes. Making profit means making profit. But profit is a specific legal term. It has a specific meaning. The license does not say you can't make any revenue or that you can't break even it says you can't profit from it. This is why college students should not write licenses. That should be left to the lawyers.

Even though it would mean I'd have to start all over, I almost wish they would just revoke the license just so this argument would finally die.

You know, we could take care of that ourselves without them doing anything, if people just stopped jumping into the same old discussion to say the same old things… :wink:

I understand what your saying, it is pretty much the whole spirit of the license idea and it is also most likely what the Diku team had wished for when writing the license. If it was written something like, "You may under no circumstance accept monetary payment for the day to day operations of your mud" then it would be clear that you cannot accept money.

Tho, as Samson has pointed out a number of times, PROFIT, under law has a very specific meaning and its meaning is very narrow in scope and applies to revenue - expenses = profit and applies only to businesses or individuals operating as a business and under tax law are able to make profit or if they are crappy at what they do a loss. This is different to an individual employee earns a wage, a wage is personal revenue, but it is not profit as defined under law.

If any of this ever went to court, it would be the legal meaning of the license, (it is a legal document after all) that would be applied to the case. I'm sorry thats not what i meant, would not hold much water. The trouble with the ambiguity of parts of the license, you might wanna hope that the judge see's it the same way as your lawyer does also.



Its also why people who have English as a second language should have someone who is a native speaker to proof read the document to ensure the correct meanings has been applied.

I don't care if you pay a $1,000/hr lawyer with a degree in English to write the DIKU license the way it was "intended" (not that we know what/how that is), somebody is going to find a rationalization for abusing it.

It's human nature to rationalize. If somebody wants to pay someone to code their ROM MUD, they'll find a way to do it and both stay out of trouble and sleep at night. They wouldn't be right, of course, but you could still fill up a few hundred megs worth of forum trolling over 10 years about it, I bet.

If nothing else, you can count on the MUD community to come together during rough times and bitch 'n moan about stuff.

PS: My Dad could kick all your dad's asses :) Ha.

Hahaha, no he couldn't, my dad is Super Man.

I wonder…

If a coder can not get paid for modifying Diku code because of the license agreement, how does a hosting service get away with charging a fee. According to the license, one cannot display the code for PROFIT.

If we assume the hosting service is providing just that, a service, and the mud administrator is the one actually displaying the code, then the same could be said about the service a coder provides. What happens with a modification, snippet, or what-have-you, falls on the mud administrator.

A coder can be paid for time, thus it is not a profit. A profit is above all said expenses. A business does not make a profit for sold goods until all the overhead is paid for, ie, electricity, materials, wages, and-so-forth.

In the case of paying someone for their time, that transaction is a break-even transaction, not a profit. If I wish to be paid for my time, then I determine the value of my time, and since I spend my time, another spends cash to compensate, thus an even exchange has occurred, not a profitable one.

Grey

By this logic, anybody in the entire world could argue away any notion of profit simply by valuing their time appropriately. (Just imagine the tax consequences! How incredible would that be.) By this definition, there is never profit in the world. Anyhow, the law doesn't interpret profit in the way you state above; fortunately the law is generally pretty clear on what it means to have a profit as a business. You were more correct when you spoke about overheads.

If you're going to argue in favor of paying coders, it should be more along the lines of orthogonal services like any others (like the hosting), and not along the lines of "even exchange" therefore somehow making the fact that somebody made money disappear. (You might also argue that the license cannot legally forbid the rendering of consulting services.)

You just necro'd a thread that's been dead for over 1.5 years to ask a question that's already been answered. See post #17.

No, your time does not have monetary value. With that kind of logic I can make the very stupid claim that I don't make a profit from my job, I just get paid for my time.

Common law of agency. The host isn't the license holder, has zero interest in the software, and are acting as an agent on behalf of the license holder. This is the same reasoning involved for hosts that offer full system backup services to users. One might ask, are these hosts software pirates because they copy software they haven't licensed? Answer is no for the same reasons.



I'm not going to address the poor wording of the license by the Danish authors. The authors have been clear they don't want their their work "commercialized" in any way.

While one could probably get away with doing anything one wants, and one will surely be treated like a pariah by the majority of the rest of Diku mud community.