Only if those organisations are legal entities. You might be able to do the same by signing a work-for-hire agreement (as the modifications you made would then never actually be copyrighted to you, but rather to the person you were working for). But you can't simply say "Bob has a licence to use X, so me and the rest of his friends can use it as well, and we don't have to follow any licences".



I already covered that earlier, when I said "Write a module of code from scratch and you can do whatever you like with it". But (as I also pointed out earlier) that's not what we're talking about in this particular situation.

Since this is the only question being asked in the end of the day, perhaps this is the only question we should be focusing on…

As soon as we start saying "as I said earlier", the circlometer starts reading "critical". :wink:

Regardless of what Soulculler himself is asking for, at the end of the day he's basically contracting out for code work. Whether it be a do_this( ch, argument ) style function or not, that code is likely to be original work. The more original and independent that work is, the clearer it becomes that the license cannot extend from the DikuMUD codebase to that new work without a hell of a lot of legalese being twisted to suit.

Given the state of the US legal system, I suppose anything goes. But in order for this to happen, Hans or someone else on the team needs to initiate a lawsuit. A bunch of us preaching about the moral equivalency of it all means exactly nothing in legal terms. Even then, I'm not sure what he's asking for could even be seen as immoral. But that's an issue for the Morals and Ethics forum we don't have :P

In order to be able to answer what gives the coder permission to modify Diku, it first needs to be clearly established that the coder is doing that vs writing independent code. Suppose the coder instead of modifying what Soulculler wants edited uses his $50 to write clear and precise directions on how to do that, and then provides the new code for the stuff that can be handled as such. That's not so clear cut a situation anymore as it would be more like paid software consulting. So are we to now say the Diku license forbids paid software consulting?

It seems clear enough to me that the license is not intended nor applicable to paid software consulting. There's been no cited case law saying it does, so I do think we are in fact going around in circles on this.

I dont know about the third party aspects of the license. The license.doc language seems to be silent on it.
The part that has always caused me pause is the initial part:
" You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in any possible way. "
It is my position that the authors have misused the word profit, in the economic sense. If you take the spirit of the license, I think they _mean_ "you may under no circumstances make any revenue on *ANY* part of DikuMud…[]". But that is not what they said. They said profit. Profit by definition is Total Revenue minus Total Costs. If this were taken to court and the court ruled in the narrow-sense, that the license is taken literally as written, then not only could you hire labor to work on DIKU, but you could also charge fees for it! Given that you keep your costs greater than your revenue, you would not violate the license. I have no idea what a court would rule. And it will probably never come to that, since the costs involved in taking someone to court would probably outweigh any damages the plaintiff might ever recover.

Their poor word-choice aside, copyright still applies. Everyone knows you can't change the descs in each room, rename the mud and remove the license. right? */sarcasm* As to the direct question of hiring labor to work on the DIKU-based mud; it would seem that economics and the dictionary are on your side. Hire away. It does seem to me that regardless of whether or not the employee is bound by the license, the DIKU copyright still remains intact. That is, whether you hire someone to add feature X to the DIKU-based mud or you do it yourself, it is still a DIKU-based mud with copyrightsm, but now it is a DIKU-based mud+X. I dont think the act of hiring someone changes anything.

Detah@Arcania

I had a pretty big post written up.. However… There's no point in a big post.



That pretty much says that you can't make money off of it. If the spirit of the license is to simply prohibit the game owner from making money on it I'm not sure… Pretty much comes down to how you imagine the spirit of the license.. The license says you have to agree to it to modify the source. If you agree to the license, you're pretty much saying that you can't make profit from it. If you get paid to modify the code, you've made profit and broke the license.

Not saying that's what they intended but pretty much, that what looks to be the case with their codebase.

Though, I'm no armchair lawyer and not someone you want to take advice from.. That's just my understanding of the situation.

EDIT: Yes, I say pretty much a lot. :p Oh, and I got a message from my friend Charles(Muerte) with a link to his coderforhire.com post(I think that's it.. I don't really browse the freelance coder sites.. :) and the first thing I noticed was Duki.. In fact, I responded to him with "dookie?"… lol

No it says you cannot make profit, and Australian Tax Law(where i live, yeah yeah yeah this is not the USa but for the most part our tax systems operate similarly.), makes clear distinctions that profit is the taxable component that remains after expenditure from the operations of a business and that an employee does not make profit, but rather makes wages or salery, which does not operate in profit and loss.

Now a third party contractor may not be making wages, he may very well be acting as a sole trader and thus be operating as a business, in which case he is making profit and would invalidate the above section of the license. Now i don't know anything about the USA labor system, but we have what are called labor hire agreements, which are short term contracts that can be used with contractors and short term positions, where the person being hired for all intents and purpose is treated under tax law as an employee for the duration of the contract, which bypasses many of the needs for that person to operate as a business.

As this horse has been flogged to death many times over on many forums i will end by saying, that i took these very questions to 2 independent legal sources and both said that under my laws at least, you can pay 3rd parties for code work and it does not breach the license. And that i recommend to anyone who runs a diku mud and wished to pay people for work rendered or do any manner of other things that the mudding community at large thinks is against the spirit of the license, to seek out legal advice where you live to make sure that what your doing is in fact legal, and once you have legal advice on the matter, use your conscience to decide if it is right for you to proceed.

in any possible way.

That is key.

One of the definitions of profit:

1: a valuable return : gain

No its not the key, its not even really relevent. Altho i agree that the definition you provided of the word profit is infact one of the many definitons of that word, it is not the defintion used under tax law, and that is the real crux here. What does your tax law say is profit and who can legally make profit. The tax laws of my country state that an individual hired to perform a service does not make profit, they earn wages and that under tax laws profit and loss are the domain of those running a bussiness entity, an individual cannot claim a loss against wages earned, the fact that they have profited from their skills as a programmer is moot in this situation. The diku cannot license in this situation the skills of the programmer, only the profitable actions of an entity making profit and loss under tax laws and as an individual does not make profit under tax law, then the section of diku talking about profit does not apply.

Question… If any part of the license does not or can not apply to an individual, then doesn't that mean that said individual thus does not have the right to modify the software since the license is what gives them said right?

I was being very specific in scope when i said that, i did not however generalize that the license did not apply to an individual, only that under tax law profit did not apply to an individual if they were an employee, and that the diku license could not apply its scope to the earning of a wage by an employee, because an employee does not make profit as defined under tax laws.

Then, does an employee need to agree to the diku license in order to write a 3rd party add on, that i do not really have an answer to, and this is the agrgument that Kavir keeps making, if you dont agree to it, you cant do anything with it.


I highly doubt that the scope of the license can actually extend to code i write that is intended to inter operate with it and that the diku license does not apply to do_tommi's_function (ch* CHAR_DATA). Tho maybe it does, i don't know. The trouble might be, that you need to modify actual diku code to actually make that module work with it, to which there are 100 ways to get around that.

One cannot help but wonder why we had to resurrect an already beaten-to-death week-old thread. :sad:

Attempting to push that through a legal proceeding is unlikely to work as the use of the very specific word "profit" carries with it some very specific legal definitions. The most common one being that profit = revenue - expenses, provided the result is not negative.

It could be argued that revenue is benefit, but I've yet to find anyone who would conclude that losing your shirt ( expenses >= revenue ) would be beneficial to anyone. It's also unlikely any jury in a civil case would conclude that either. Keep in mind, civil cases involve juries too. They're not just some judge up on the bench. You've also got 12 other people you need to convince.

LOL, you know after reading your post 5 times, i still don't know which way to take it.

Tommi, I think you're making a few unwarranted assumptions.

What I assume is:

If all this ever went to court, it would be a Danish court.

The plaintiff would be DIKU.

"profit" will be translated as "gavne", as in a newspaper headline: "EU-topjob vil gavne Danmark"


I also assume that the Danes would not think well of someone that tried to make money from something payed for by their tax dollars. Taking advantage of school children because they chose the wrong word in a foreign language? Oh, yeh, you'll get plenty of sympathy from the Danish jury. :)

A Danish court would not have jurisdiction to hear a case where the alleged crime was not committed on Danish soil. The case would need to be brought in the country that the crime was committed.

Further, there would be no need to translate into Dane the meaning of the word PROFIT for convenience, the license was written in Plain English and thus it is the English meaning that is important. One cannot write a license in English then sue someone based on its meaning in Klingon, Swahili or any other language where the meaning can be twisted to suit a purpose.

And while you might not like what i have said, everything i have said is perfectly legal within the bounds of the Australian legal system (which happens to be where i live), so don't try and imply that i am advocating or attempting to take advantage of Diku. My position has always been the same, seek legal advice where you live, then use your conscience to decide weather you should proceed down that road.

Personally, if i was to hire coders to write modules for a Diku based mud, i would write an interoperability layer, provide them with a spec sheet and have them isolated entirely from Diku code. That alone would stop the whiners and extremists. The coder then has no need to agree to the Diku license as they dont have to touch, modify, read, or anything with diku code. A simple implementation of Lua would do that very nicely.



And they were not school children, they were young adults at university and as such had access to the uni's lawers, staff and students of the law facualty and other wise minds of the academic staff to draw upon to formulate a license. They also could have at a latter date made corrections to the license, amendments that clarified their true sentiment and put a stop to the debate and SPIRIT of the LICENSE crap. They have not and did not, which to me shows that they are 100% completely happy with the wording of the license. So that anyone who uses the diku code can do so within what is LAWFUL for them to do so. At the end of the day that is all that matters, what is lawful, not yours or anyone opinion or spirit of the mater.

The Danish courts might be able to assert jurisdiction under the Berne Convention. So don't discount the legal possibility of that happening. It's just entirely unlikely that they'd go to the trouble of filing a civil case involving international parties. Violating the DIKU license in whatever way it's violated wouldn't warrant criminal prosecution under the criminal portions of the Copyright Act.

You may be right, tho to the best of my understanding that is not how things operate and that the international treaties Berne et al are more about signatory countries having a similar set of base laws. IE: Diku Mud code is covered by copyright which they filed or was granted to them in Denmark. under the Berne convention and other treaties, Diku Mud Code is also automatically covered by copyright laws in Australia, USA, Mexico and any other country who is also a signatory to that pact, but that a breach of copyright would still have to be dealt with in the country that the offense was committed.

If the above was not the case, the whole copyright system, laws and pacts would become a joke, with 1000's of fake suits being issued because its easy to win the case when no one turns up to defend it. I know if i was asked to defend myself on a civil case in Denmark i would reply telling them to blow me, because there is nothing that they can do to force me to do anything, no such thing as extradition for a civil matter, heck being Australian i might petition Queen Mary and ask for a pardon, Danish queen, or queen to be is an Australian National.

Hey, I have an idea. Why don't we sue somebody for Diku infringement and see what happens, and test all these wild theories! No? OK then, then why don't we stop discussing this silliness for the n^th time. :wink:

LOL fortunately we can't, but i had a good giggle thinking over the mess that could be created in such a scenario, It would turn the courts into just another day at mud connect.

The funny thing about this topic… it's usually all hypothetical and is rarely ever discussed in regards to an actual or possible license violator. I could see this conversation perhaps having some relevance when it is brought up every 4 months or so if it was being directed toward a newly found license violator and it's people trying to convince them to oblige while the other side is trying to defend their position.

But no, usually someone asks a question, and the debate drags out for about two weeks with the same people saying the same things time and time again.

I'm not complaining necessarily, I just find it amusing.