06 Dec, 2009, Korimyr the Rat wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I am looking at potentially opening a MUD as an adjunct to my RPG business. Regardless of whether or not the MUD itself generates revenue, this is clearly commercial activity, and I am hoping that with the right donation model that it might pay for itself or even turn a profit.

The question is, what codebases allow this? I've tried searching, but I can't find a list of codebases by license and I generally can't find any information about a given codebase's license unless I download it and go hunting. As confident as I am in my coder's abilities, modifying an existing codebase to suit reduces our startup time from years to months.

If someone could point me to a link that lists codebases by license, and licenses by what they allow, I'd be terribly grateful.

Alternately, I'm happy to listen to peoples' recommendations for a codebase that meets the following criteria:

  • Must allow commercial use, including profit.
  • Must be free or have low one-time license fee.
  • Programmed in C++, or another object oriented C derivative. (My coder can adapt. I can't.)

    Obviously, more features is a plus as is less restrictive license. Similarity to Circle is a huge plus.
  • 06 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
    Votes: 0
    Some codebases allow commercial licences, but the prices are quite high - I think the IRE engine is/was around $10K+royalties, but I'm not sure if that was one-off or yearly, and the only mud I know of that was using it had their licence revoked. DGD charges around $100K/year for commercial use, although I think they offer some strange ways of lowering the price (you'd have to negotiate though).

    To be honest you'd probably be better off checking out Tyche's list of open source codebases:

    http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?Open...

    If you want feature-rich you could check out CoffeeMUD (written in Java, so if your programmer is already proficient in C++ he should be able to pick it up reasonably fast).
    06 Dec, 2009, Korimyr the Rat wrote in the 3rd comment:
    Votes: 0
    KaVir said:
    Some codebases allow commercial licences, but the prices are quite high - I think the IRE engine is/was around $10K+royalties, but I'm not sure if that was one-off or yearly, and the only mud I know of that was using it had their licence revoked. DGD charges around $100K/year for commercial use, although I think they offer some strange ways of lowering the price (you'd have to negotiate though).


    Seriously, for people trying to compete with free games? That's obscene. Thank you.

    Do you know of anyone who actually pays those prices?

    KaVir said:
    To be honest you'd probably be better off checking out Tyche's list of open source codebases:

    http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?Open...


    Thanks again.

    KaVir said:
    If you want feature-rich you could check out CoffeeMUD (written in Java, so if your programmer is already proficient in C++ he should be able to pick it up reasonably fast).


    Been wanting to avoid Java, but I'll look into it. Thank you.
    06 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 4th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Korimyr the Rat said:
    Do you know of anyone who actually pays those prices?

    As I said before, there was one mud using the IRE engine, but they had their licence revoked before they opened. I know Skotos uses DGD for some of their commercial games, but I don't know whether they pay the full licence fee or have some sort of special deal.

    Another option is Valhalla (aka Diku II), which offers a Business License for a far more reasonable one-off payment of $899 (although you do have to pay for later upgrades if you want them).
    06 Dec, 2009, Korimyr the Rat wrote in the 5th comment:
    Votes: 0
    For a Diku derivative, I'm almost tempted to shell out the $899 but my partners would skin me. They don't see the same potential in this project as I do, so my coder and I are working on personal budget only.
    06 Dec, 2009, Skol wrote in the 6th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Isn't LP available to use for profit? I haven't played/messed with it at all, but I thought it was.
    Diku2 would seem the best of what's been mentioned, especially if they used similar coding/format, for someone from a Diku background.
    06 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 7th comment:
    Votes: 0
    I remember reading that Felix set the licensing fee for DGD at such a high price because he was tired of wasting time dealing with enquiries from people who weren't serious enough to see it through. I also imagine he made a big bundle of cash from ichat/Yahoo so didn't need to bother chasing every nickel from MUDs. Skotos are able to sub license DGD so you could always approach them if you wanted to use it commercially. I think it's a similar story with IRE; the licensing fee is largely there as a disincentive and nobody outside of IRE has ever successfully licensed it (KaVir already mentioned the one project which was canned).

    You can, AFAIK, use all the various flavours of MUSH and MUX, ColdC, Cool etc commercially. Skotos used ColdC for The Eternal City so it has a proven commercial pedigree. Regarding LP Muds Threshold uses a GPL version of MudOS and the Shattered Worlds LP driver was released under the GPL.

    Coffeemud has already been mentioned as a DIKU style (in terms of gameplay) codebase that is available for commercial use, but I'll also recommend Nakedmud which is what we use. It doesn't have any game content, but it does come with the concepts of zones, rooms, objects, mobiles, triggers, OLC and scripting, so there are a lot of tools there to build a game with. It uses a C core with Python as a scripting language, but you could use Python for almost all your game logic if you wanted to.
    06 Dec, 2009, Mudder wrote in the 8th comment:
    Votes: 0
    One would think that someone selling a codebase would work with lower numbers, making money from volume versus "quality." $200.00 I would assume a rather decently high price that would filter out undesirables.
    06 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
    Votes: 0
    When you're selling things, you have to start putting up support and all kinds of salesmanship. Expending that much effort for $200 for people who aren't serious is a waste of time. I don't think that the MUD codebase market is large enough to make it up in volume, to be honest.
    06 Dec, 2009, Tyche wrote in the 10th comment:
    Votes: 0
    KaVir said:
    To be honest you'd probably be better off checking out Tyche's list of open source codebases:

    http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?Open...

    If you want feature-rich you could check out CoffeeMUD (written in Java, so if your programmer is already proficient in C++ he should be able to pick it up reasonably fast).


    I think ScryMud is fairly Diku-muddish-like and in C++ to boot.
    Yet I get the distinct impression from the thrust of the posts that we're into…. "But… I want a Diku pony!!!" territory.
    0.0/10