16 Jul, 2014, Hades_Kane wrote in the 1st comment:
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I stumbled across Buffy MUD from TMC earlier (Buffy is one of my favorite shows) and once in game, I pay extra attention to any game that advertises itself as custom, has no credit given within the login sequence, and solicits donations that feels even a little familiar.

There are certainly numerous aspects that strike me particularly Diku oriented, I thought some second opinions and others paying mind to the game might be warranted.

buffymud.wolfpaw.net 5000 [204.209.44.3]

http://www.mudconnect.com/mud-bin/adv_se...
16 Jul, 2014, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
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17 Jul, 2014, Hades_Kane wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Oh wow, totally forgot about that. Over 7 years ago, I suppose that's easy to do.
17 Jul, 2014, Hades_Kane wrote in the 4th comment:
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Well, just read that old thread. I can't believe even after 7 years I forgot about what that turned into.

Thanks for the reminder!

That said, I think the issue was presented and "dealt with" as well as it could have been back then, and 7 years later, Diku or not, the MUD is still around.

This may as well constitute (off site) thread necromancy, I'd be content with it being deleted if another Mod felt that to be appropriate.
15 Sep, 2014, Jodah wrote in the 5th comment:
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You see, Hades, I told you people dont get sued for mud copyrights. You'd be in jail now if they did!
15 Sep, 2014, Nathan wrote in the 6th comment:
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Is there any point to bothering? Especially when it comes to Diku?

The only real approach you can apply is to shun them, not play their game and refuse to advertise for them if you are a website like TMC or MudBytes. Beyond that you are wasting your time. Granted that not crediting people if they used a substantial portion of their code rankles a lot more than worrying about the other clauses which come across as silly. If they want to charge to physically move a copy to someone in the real world (which isn't really a way of doing things anymore for most people) or ask for donations to keep a game running (i.e. you can't/won't pay for it entirely out of your own pocket) what's the big deal? It might be technically against the license, but the license is somewhat silly to insist on that and there's nothing morally objectionable in ignoring those clauses persay. Unless I am deeply confused Ethic !(===) Morals.

There is of course, the issue that unless you can see the code you can't prove that the underlying code is copied, only that the outward appearance/interface is likely copied/emulated, as was noted in the linked thread. It's probably very rare, but suppose the coder followed the exact command syntax and outward behavior and literally copied the helpfiles and motd. It could look and feel mostly like Diku or some other codebase, but have very little identical code and not be copied. I.e. reverse engineering of some kind. If that was actually the case, then the only leg you have to stand on is a somewhat vague argument that the actual game aspects (places, quests, helpfiles, etc) are part of the game and that somehow they are misusing them by making profit somewhere. Of course at that point, they can just substitute other player made content and make the argument even harder…
15 Sep, 2014, Ssolvarain wrote in the 7th comment:
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Your opinion on the matter is pretty much moot.

They expressed the intent of the license. If you don't like it, don't use it.
15 Sep, 2014, KaVir wrote in the 8th comment:
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Ssolvarain said:
Your opinion on the matter is pretty much moot.

They expressed the intent of the license. If you don't like it, don't use it.

You're right of course. But some people have a false sense of entitlement, and will go to great lengths to try and justify why the licence (or at least the parts they find inconvenient) shouldn't apply to them. You wouldn't believe the indignant whining, tantrums, excuses and accusations thrown around by mud owners when they were booted from the TMC mud list for refusing to follow the licence!
15 Sep, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 9th comment:
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Nathan said:
It's probably very rare, but suppose the coder followed the exact command syntax and outward behavior and literally copied the helpfiles and motd. It could look and feel mostly like Diku or some other codebase, but have very little identical code and not be copied. I.e. reverse engineering of some kind. If that was actually the case, then the only leg you have to stand on is a somewhat vague argument that the actual game aspects (places, quests, helpfiles, etc) are part of the game and that somehow they are misusing them by making profit somewhere.


Well, no, actually, there is an established way to handle those situations–a voluntary audit. If you have a custom codebase that was influenced by, but not derivative from Diku, you can easily clear matters up by letting someone with a good community standing and the relevant expertise audit your code and report back. This has happened several times in the past already. If someone declines to open their books (despite standing only to gain from disproving accusations) then the community has every reason to assume something shady is going on.

And, no, it's not about lawsuits. But this is a small community of like-minded people, and if your reputation among them doesn't matter to you, then you should be prepared for your hobby to turn into a lonely and emotionally unrewarding pastime.
15 Sep, 2014, Kelvin wrote in the 10th comment:
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plamzi said:
And, no, it's not about lawsuits. But this is a small community of like-minded people, and if your reputation among them doesn't matter to you, then you should be prepared for your hobby to turn into a lonely and emotionally unrewarding pastime.


Honestly, I doubt many of their players care about this. It's just not high on most people's list of cares, unless they have some MUD dev experience. It's not really a tangible thing to them, and they don't have a great way of proving that what they are hearing is anything more than rumor.

That doesn't make it right, but this is simply not going to matter to the vast majority of players on this game.
15 Sep, 2014, plamzi wrote in the 11th comment:
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Kelvin said:
plamzi said:
And, no, it's not about lawsuits. But this is a small community of like-minded people, and if your reputation among them doesn't matter to you, then you should be prepared for your hobby to turn into a lonely and emotionally unrewarding pastime.


Honestly, I doubt many of their players care about this.


I meant the admins. I'm pretty sure most players won't care either way. But admins / devs being shunned and ostracized by their peers should hurt a bit. Banishment is a legitimate form of punishment.
16 Sep, 2014, Nathan wrote in the 12th comment:
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Ssolvarain said:
Your opinion on the matter is pretty much moot.

They expressed the intent of the license. If you don't like it, don't use it.


If you're talking to me, then I think you misunderstood what I said. What I said was that I personally wouldn't be going to any great lengths to bother the owner of software with such a license if I knew that those particular clauses were the ones basically being ignored by someone using their software, nor would I encourage anyone else to. Those things don't bother me enough that I feel the need to discourage it by trying to find the rights owner and make it a problem for the party in question.

Further, without good, solid proof of wrongdoing there is no reason to go around reporting someone as violating a license just because the output of their code happens to look vaguely like Diku's output. You might be causing a great deal of unnecessary noise and nuisance if you jump to conclusions.

plamzi said:
Nathan said:
It's probably very rare, but suppose the coder followed the exact command syntax and outward behavior and literally copied the helpfiles and motd. It could look and feel mostly like Diku or some other codebase, but have very little identical code and not be copied. I.e. reverse engineering of some kind. If that was actually the case, then the only leg you have to stand on is a somewhat vague argument that the actual game aspects (places, quests, helpfiles, etc) are part of the game and that somehow they are misusing them by making profit somewhere.


Well, no, actually, there is an established way to handle those situations–a voluntary audit. If you have a custom codebase that was influenced by, but not derivative from Diku, you can easily clear matters up by letting someone with a good community standing and the relevant expertise audit your code and report back. This has happened several times in the past already. If someone declines to open their books (despite standing only to gain from disproving accusations) then the community has every reason to assume something shady is going on.

And, no, it's not about lawsuits. But this is a small community of like-minded people, and if your reputation among them doesn't matter to you, then you should be prepared for your hobby to turn into a lonely and emotionally unrewarding pastime.


I don't see any reason anyone should have to someone else audit their code unless they desire some kind of satisfaction or peace of mind. I disagree that merely refusing to show someone else your code in that regard implies shadyness and I will have you know that the community doesn't have ANY "right" to ASSUME anything. They may certainly choose to boycott your game if they desire (as if they were playing it anyway…), but making potentially invalid assumptions and acting on them is not how anyone should behave. If anything those concerned should do their best to find any significant proof and then address that issue directly with the party in question before bringing it up in a forum. At the end of the day it is not the community's job or responsibility to police the license agreements of some third party, although they may certainly vote with their feet.
16 Sep, 2014, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 13th comment:
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>you can easily clear matters up by letting someone with a good community standing and the relevant expertise audit your code and report back.

Sure, but what about just NO. That feels like blackmailing: "I will belliter you till you let me see your code…"
You want to sue, just sue, and pay for the consequences if you are wrong.
21 Sep, 2014, quixadhal wrote in the 14th comment:
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It's an interesting question.

What makes any particular person (or group) trustworthy to give any given codebase the "stamp of approval" of it being "not a dikurivative", or the shunning offense of saying it IS a license violator?

The community, as a whole, seems to have accepted SocketMUD as an original codebase. Yet, when I downloaded it ages ago, I saw lots of things that screamed DikuMUD at me. Does that mean the author borrowed and refactored DikuMUD code? No. Does it mean the author is very familiar with DikuMUD and let it influence his design and choice of function/variable names? Possibly.
21 Sep, 2014, alteraeon wrote in the 15th comment:
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There are easier ways to show you're not a Diku than finding someone trustworthy to audit your whole codebase: post a few files publicly. IIRC, I did this in the past with some of the object handling routines and a few other common infrastructure parts that you generally wouldn't bother to change if you started from Diku. If your codebase truly isn't derived from Diku, in most cases it'll be obvious. You can actually release a pretty big chunk of your codebase and have little to worry about - it's not like someone is going to take your files and use them without the libraries they depend on.

It's a pretty quick fix - half an hour of finding something complicated you're comfortable releasing, versus days and weeks of flamewars. The only reason not to do it is if you think you're getting better PR by arguing, or if your code really is Diku based.

Alter Aeon MUD
http://www.alteraeon.com
21 Sep, 2014, Kelvin wrote in the 16th comment:
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alteraeon said:
It's a pretty quick fix - half an hour of finding something complicated you're comfortable releasing, versus days and weeks of flamewars. The only reason not to do it is if you think you're getting better PR by arguing, or if your code really is Diku based.


Or if you are closed-source and don't care to even address the mob with pitch forks and torches. Some will never be satisfied even if you release some code that you had no intention of releasing. "Well, he just selectively sent us a part of the codebase that he rewrote or wrote from scratch, but the rest still infringes."

If I were in this situation, I'm not so sure I'd play along. Best case I placate some but not all of the Mudbytes crowd (who are mostly other mud devs, not prospective players). Worst case I release code that wasn't meant to be released, spend time that I could doing other things, and suffer ill will for trying to cooperate. With the caveat that I'd never knowingly disregard a license, I don't think I'd feel obligated to do anything to placate a bunch of MUD admins/tinkerers who can often be hostile and petty.
21 Sep, 2014, KaVir wrote in the 17th comment:
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Kelvin said:
Or if you are closed-source and don't care to even address the mob with pitch forks and torches. Some will never be satisfied even if you release some code that you had no intention of releasing.

Hyperbole. In my first post I linked to a thread on TMC, where I said the following:

"While it certainly has a strong Diku feel, as well as a few command similarities, I couldn't find anything which really convinced me it was a Diku derivative. And I'm not in the habit of making such accusations without very compelling evidence."

And that's the way it really works. While you may receive a few accusations for suspicious similarites, it requires very compelling evidence before you'll face serious accusations.

An accusation will also list similarites, which should be easy to disprove with a few sections of code that'll be worthless to anyone else. Turn the thread into a positive discussion of your implementations and it'll provide far better promotion than some generic advert.
21 Sep, 2014, Pymeus wrote in the 18th comment:
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Thanks, KaVir, for covering the de-listing/banning process from a practical point of view. Although we're ROM-based now, we've toyed with writing ourselves a codebase from scratch several times through the years, which in our case would include emulating portions of the UI our players are accustomed to. Obviously any risk of being de-listed from the largest mud lists after so much effort would be… disheartening.
21 Sep, 2014, Oliver wrote in the 19th comment:
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Pymeus said:
Thanks, KaVir, for covering the de-listing/banning process from a practical point of view. Although we're ROM-based now, we've toyed with writing ourselves a codebase from scratch several times through the years, which in our case would include emulating portions of the UI our players are accustomed to. Obviously any risk of being de-listed from the largest mud lists after so much effort would be… disheartening.


Why not just do this but retain the credits seeing as how all the players and functionality is still derived from diku? Rewriting your codebase is fine, but rewriting the functionality of another program (I.e. reverse engineering) is a bit questionable if you're not giving credit.

And over years and years, I've never seen a Dikurivative lambasted by the community for license violation that also clearly and concisely retained credits.

I even suspect most people 'round here would be okay with you making a diku-reverse-engineered lookalike and then proceeded to make it pay-to-play if you expressly retained credits and showed the mud-world snippets of vastly different code.
22 Sep, 2014, Hades_Kane wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Or if you are closed-source and don't care to even address the mob with pitch forks and torches. Some will never be satisfied even if you release some code that you had no intention of releasing. "Well, he just selectively sent us a part of the codebase that he rewrote or wrote from scratch, but the rest still infringes."


It isn't about nabbing pitch forks and causing trouble.

I'm the one who, on two separate occasions, brought this issue up.

And the thing is, the intent was never to try to draw and quarter someone, and certainly not to accuse without sufficient evidence. This is how most of these go, too… someone has some suspicions, brings it up, the community does what it can to investigate.

In this instance, we did some poking around, but nothing conclusive came of it, so it was dropped.

Personally, I think far too many things are basically exact for it NOT to be Diku (and likely ROM).

I've been playing/building/developing on ROM codebases since 1999, and even with THAT much time being practically exclusive to that codebase, if I suddenly decided to write my own tomorrow with even the intention of making it like what I'm used to, I doubt I could cobble together something together as close to the look/feel as this game has.

Particularly with the syntax messaging and other things like that? You'd basically have to have the codebases side by side and purposely copying exact strings in order to have that much similarity, and I find it extremely unlikely to the point of the absurd to think that anyone would do that, or go through that much trouble to write their own codebase from scratch, but then copy, word for word, most of the messaging strings throughout another codebase. Of course, this is basically what they claimed to do, much the same with HOTL3.

But in this case, the only evidence is circumstantial or "gut feeling" types, and it was taken as far as it could have been within reason, and it was dropped. There was never any REAL accusation lobbied here, just a bunch of people speculating, and other than sending an email to the owner of the game inquiring about that, no action was taken on it either.

Despite my being convinced it is indeed ROM, the only thing I could reasonably do is decide to not play the game, which is the course of action I took.

This tends to be pretty typical within the community on how these things end up. Without solid evidence or proof (such as a credits helpfile still being in place after having been overlooked by someone stripping out other obvious indicators), people tend to let it go pretty easy.

Of course, me bringing this back up in the first place was an honest mistake on my part. I had completely forgot that I was concerned with this 7 years prior… I'm a big Buffy fan and it's no surprise that a MUD based on that caught my attention 7 years apart.
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