Haha. Too late.

Can a mod please fix that?

I have to admit that I really do not understand how you come to this conclusion.

If I get donations from my MUD website and spend them on beer, that's ok, but if I get the very same donations from the very same place and choose to spend them on my hosted VM instead… it's a violation?

Are you using intuition here or some kind of legal basis? Have you seen or read of cases like this before?

What you're saying is, essentially, that profiting from the game via donations is fine, as long as you're not actually putting that money back into the game… Surely, that is a little strange, no?

Yup :)

This is like watching a dog chase it's tail.

Funny, but completely pointless.

As an Aside, I almost pissed myself laughing at the "server won't run without the codebase" comment. Last I checked, even if my MUD isn't running, my Linode still is…

David,

You are reading things into what I said, which explains why you don't understand it.

If you solicit donations from your MUD website under a stated intent that you'll spend them on beer, and you do spend them on beer, then nothing you did concerns the DikuMUD license at all.

But if you solicit donations for supporting/maintaining a DikuMUD server (which should be free under the license), and you spend the proceeds on the MUD server hosting or on beer, or on anything else you please, then clearly you are making profit from the codebase, in violation of the license agreement. That is, you have used the DikuMUD server as a tool to generate revenue, and because the server was provided to you for free, all that revenue is profit.

My key point, again, is that whether a donation (or any other form of revenue) is profit made directly from the codebase can only be determined when the revenue used. Here's an extreme example that will hopefully make it clear why:

Let's say you start soliciting donations for your DikuMUD server by telling players that you'll be forced close the game down if they don't donate. Let's say you even offer monthly subscriptions and in-game items for purchase with real money. Surely, this looks bad… But then you turn around, and diligently send every last penny to the makers of DikuMUD, and you pay for your server out of your own pocket. At this time, it is clear that you did not violate the license, which states that you, the end user, cannot profit in any way. (You may have violated some moral laws by not stating your end goal openly at the time when you generated revenue, but you did not violate the license.)

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that you have to wait for the revenue to be put to use before you can determine whether there's a problem.

No, I'm not reading into this – I'm trying to stop you at this notion of why the usage of donations matter.

If I ask for donations, then that's it – you're giving me money because you feel like it, and I'm taking it because I like your money, and I'm not giving you anything back because it's, well, a donation.


If Sony sells you an MP3 player and uses the money to help orphans, are they not making money in the same way as if they'd used it to build a factory?

I don't understand why you think the usage of money is so important. What matters is how the money is made, not how it is later spent.


Then you are no longer soliciting donations, but clearly selling in-game content for money. These are not donations.


But we were talking about donations, not in-game consideration. So I don't see why it illustrates any point about donations.

What you are saying is, basically, that I can use money obtained directly or indirectly from the game to buy a new TV for myself, but if I used it to pay for my server, that's violating the license. That's just a little odd, right?

If the license were written by a lawyer, there would be less misunderstandings what you may and may not do.



I want to sell T-Shirts with "DikuMUD" on them!

'a DikuMUD server (which should be free under the license)'
There is no such thing as a 'DikuMUD server'
There is a server, where one of the process can be a Dikumud. I can perfectly say: support the server. If people find in their interest to have it running on THAT server so the mud run on it so they can access it everytime they want, it is their problem, not mine.
Because you know what, the mud owner makes absolutely no profit from having a server to run the mud, since he can perfectly run it on its own computer at home. That he sometimes shut down.
Who actually profit from the server if not the players ?
I actually do not see in any way how the owner of the mud would gain anything, really.

In the case where you're soliciting donations without stating what you're going to use them for, you can still establish intent based on where that "donate" button is. If you put the button on your personal website, then you're clear, because you're not stating or implying a connection between the donation and the MUD server. But if you put the button on your MUD site, you open yourself to the accusation that you're using the DikuMUD codebase (even if it's implicitly) to solicit cash.

But maybe by putting a bare "donate" button on the MUD site you meant to raise money for the website hosting. At the time when you spend the donation money, it would become clear whether you've actually violated the license or not. If you spend it all on the site itself, then no harm done. If you put some or all of it into the MUD server (which would not exist without the codebase), then you can be said to have made profit from the codebase. If you spend it all on beer, I imagine that a good copyright lawyer could still nail you for implicitly using the codebase as a tool to solicit personal donations.

I don't think it can get much clearer than this and I don't think that it would be difficult to resolve any case based solely on the words in the license agreement. And still, people see what they want to see… If you think that by not advertising to the world what donations are going to be used for you are somehow honoring the DikuMUD license, then probably no-one can stop you. All I know is I wouldn't do that…





It doesn't matter if you bury the DikuMUD server process inside a million other processes. If you use any part of your revenues to offset costs that you yourself decided to incur, then you're effectively selling access to the DikuMUD server process. Again, if that were allowed, I could solicit donations, sell in-game items and pay myself a reasonable developer salary (I wish) like a non-profit organization would.

Again, profit has a strict definition, and playing a game is not profit. Precisely because DikuMUD can be run for free, you are not allowed to charge for access to it.

There's an equivocation fallacy here.

The application that runs DikuMUD can correctly be called a DikuMUD server.
The machine on which this application runs can also correctly be called a DikuMUD server.

The word server means different things in those contexts. Since I believe the two of you are arguing different DikuMUD servers, it might be nice to clarify which you're talking about.

I have to deal with this all the time.

"The database is unavailable."

"Erm…do you mean the physical server, the instance process, or the data itself?"

*funny look*

"I'm telling you Oracle is down."

"…."

How about we start a donation so a lawyer can be consulted and post their response in this thread and close it down for good?

I'd like to first establish why "intent" matters here. I think it's a little weird to keep focusing on it.


Why is this different from soliciting cash for tshirts?


No harm done if you're spending it on the site, but it's a violation to run the VM, and you could get in trouble for buying beer??

I think we really need to go to first principles here… the test you are using is rather mysterious to me. :sad:

I'll be up-front though and admit that I'm losing interest a little here. :smile:

I lost interest a long time ago, and furthermore no-one's paying us to enforce the letter of the DikuMUD license… As I've said repeatedly, my views are pretty liberal on the actual practice of soliciting donations. I just strongly disagree that the license is not clear about that…

"Intent" is a very important legal term, every bit as important as "evidence." If you can't see the difference between selling souvenir t-shirts and asking for money to pay for what should be a free game server, sigh, then you don't see a difference. But that's not because there isn't any.

I'm tired of belaboring my point, and at this point I'm not sure how useful that would be. I do think that anyone who begins by asking him/herself, "Am I violating the license by doing [fill the blank]" can use simple reasoning to determine that conclusively. Those who begin by saying "I'm not violating the license because [fill the blank]" are going to see confusion everywhere.

It's not that I don't see any difference whatsoever. It's that I think you're establishing differences that aren't there, namely that the nature of taking donations changes depending on what you end up doing with the received money. (And no, we're not talking about giving people who donate you money stuff, because then it's not a donation anymore.)

It boils down to this: you think it's profiting if you use donations to run the server, but you do not think it's profiting if you use the very same donations to run the website (which could be on the same server???) or buy beer. That to me is frankly a little mind-boggling and I know of no legal basis for it.

Lol @ Plamzi: "I lost interest a long time ago.." but proceeded to make 20+ replies anyway.. ::facepalm::

Anyway, you're still making arguments based on a false assumption; that "profit" is some loose, malleable word that can mean whatever is most convenient to your position when the reality is, in a court room, they are going to have a pretty clear-cut and dry position on what constitutes "profit".

As in, if you solicit for donations (anywhere; website, mud, mailing list) for your MUD (server costs, domain name, programmer) and that money goes into those operating costs then it is not profit (as has already been discussed previously.)

Sure, profit can be stretched to mean 'a gain' in any sense of the word when you're speaking in regular context. I went to the library earlier and it was a profitable venture; I found The Book of Five Rings and I've been wanting that for a long time. See it? SEE IT??! I used the word profit in that sentence… but alas, this is not the same 'profit' understood to be used in the context of a license.

David's last post summarized well. It seems, Plamzi, that you in-fact have the exact opposite position of what is actually legally sound.

If you use donations to pay specifically for the operating costs of your MUD (DikuMUD) but do not use them for beer, a website, or other unrelated things, then you are within the rights of the license.

If you solicit for donations through your MUD (DikuMUD) and use them for ANYTHING other than operating costs, you are profiting and committing a serious crime, both legally and morally.

The legal basis is all in the license. It boils down to this: if it can be shown that you made profit out of any part of DikuMUD, you violated the license. In order for that to be shown, intent and the actual use of donations would have to be considered.

Yes, I do think that that if you use donations to run the DikuMUD server, a strong case can be made that you've profited from the code.

No, I don't think that the act of buying beer alone is enough to draw a conclusion–you have to also consider the intent. If you asked for money for your DikuMUD server, and then spent the money on beer, then it can be argued that you used the codebase as a tool to solicit personal donations. If you solicited donations without making any explicit or implicit references to the DikuMUD server, then you can use the money for whatever you want.

Am I the only one who thinks this is beyond obvious?

From what I understand David's point is that it doesn't matter what you do with the money. I agree with him on that point, at least. Where I differ is the in the legality of accepting donations at all. Even if "just for the disc."

You are not addressing the substance of my argument. Making claims that my position is the "opposite" of what's legal and that I'm stretching the definition of profit doesn't make it so. Read my posts again.

P. S. It is not at all convenient to me that the DikuMUD license prevents soliciting donations to cover server costs. The opposite is much more convenient, but I'm not prepared to bend the words of the license to my convenience.



Of course it matters what you do with the money. In my hypothetical case, if you raise a ton of money through donations and sales and send all of it to the makers of DikuMUD, are you not in complete compliance with their license? You are.