Yes, DH, clearly the license can not restrict you unlawfully..

..but I don't think the profit restriction is 1. unlawful or 2. unenforcable.

And to Runter, that's why I brought up audits. I think if you are accepting donations to cover server costs, you should (if at all concerned about the license) track expenses (related to your mud.. personal should be a given) and make sure you could show on paper that the money you solicited for via donations was used to pay for operating costs.

Do you really need to do this? No. (Probably not.) I'm just saying, there is a valid stipulation on the license, but it -also- wouldn't be very hard to make a case for yourself. Hosting? Server hardware upgrades? Domain names? Third-party software used to develop the game? Sure. Could probably argue for all of those as long as you have some reciepts and could explain how they're used for the MUD. A salary for you? Probably not. Unless your MUD is actually a tax-exempt non-profit, giving yourself a salary from these donations is pretty darn close to illegal. (I.e. you will lose that one in court.)

Right. The US IRS calls it income.

Yes, I do not think that the profit restriction, for obvious business-related revenue, is either of those, either. My argument is that donations in particular are separate. For example, I could easily have a donation button on my personal site, off of the MUD site, and people know that if they want to thank me they go there. I do not consider this to even be the slightest bit of a moral problem, to be honest.

Anyhow the point is moot given what the authors said about it; they're fine with donations.

So far I've seen only Hans Henrik Staerfeldt stating that donations are not against the license.

Staerfeldt's answer to that was stating otherwise and saying "I do not believe that we disagree on the license." Go figure.

No, that was his answer to the claim that the Diku team disagreed on the licence. The conversation followed an audit I did on TMC, and went like this (heavily snipped for brevity, for more see here and here).

Richard (me) addressing the Diku team: "A ROM mud by the name of "Dark and Shattered Lands" has started taking donations from the players in exchange for houses/taverns/land ownership within the game … the mud owner (Tony Allen) is claiming that you (the Diku team) support this idea … can you please confirm or deny whether he has your support on this issue?"

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt addressing me: "Well, he is clearly using the game for generating profit … i am not against donations as such, and he may sell his merchandise as he pleases, but he may not use the game directly for this. The way i usually define this is if the players get some tangible modification within the game for their donations. Then it becomes commercialized. They pay for a service that is within the game."

Michael Seifert addressing Tony Allen: "I regret to tell you that Richard is right. It is the intention of the license agreement that you should not receive for donations."

Tony Allen addressing the Diku team: "Would it be safe to assume some of the founders of DikuMud disagree on the license?"

Michael Seifert addressing Tony Allen: "Sorry, but I do not have the time to argue about this. I am simply stating the intention of the license. I am certain that Hans-Henrik agrees with me."

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt addressing Tony Allen: "I do not believe that we disagree on the license."

I didn't know that. Too bad I can't see the original conversation (tried to find it at groups.google.com and failed).

Snicker, any admin selling stuff in game is a moron anyway ilmho. I hate games where either time spent/money (the same actually) makes you better just for that and not your skills.
Yes it is hard to balance casual againt hardcore gamer but it is doable.
Just make so the time/money spent can be looted in a fair game. Off course that will probably drives away payfor people that only likes to brag about 'how powerful' they are, (and then whine cause they loss everything because someone smarter got it all by their skills) thus less revenue…but for the spirit of the game everyone else win.

Are you seriously saying that the concept of selling in-game stuff is moronic?

@David Hailey in response to Kavir's post:

It would seem the (brief) interview with the license authors amounts to them effectively reiterating what was already stated in the license: There is no restriction on donations, there is a restriction on profit. So…. way back to square one: If you solicit for donations through your MUD - make sure they are invested into operating costs so as not to be taken as profit which would violate the license even if the money was donated.


@Rarva: Yea, selling things is silly. We should give everything away and hope power company, landlords, etc. start doing the same.

Perfect example of ESL problems.

We know Seifert's first language is not English, so we forgive him various classes of grammar errors in an almost
subconscious way…so that when he says "you should not receive for donations" we helpfully drop the "for" since
it doesn't really make sense there, and we come to the conclusion that he doesn't like donations at all, but Hans-Henrik
is ok with them.

So then why do they think they are actually in agreement?

Well, assuming I am not committing my own subconscious edit-error, his sentence did not need to have the
"for" dropped, it needed to have a noun added! He probably meant:

"You should not receive consideration for donations."

Or some such similar word or phrase.

Better than taking up a collection for a lawyer would be commissioning a translator to interview
them at length in their mother tongue about their intent and then posting that translation, and then taking
new questions back to the diku team for clarification.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Better than taking up collection for a lawyer/translator is using Dead Souls! :)

This is nonsense, though. It doesn't change the status of the donation based on where you solicit it. When you get a donation it's up to your sole discretion where it be spent. It's *your money* at that point. It doesn't matter if the donation link was on your personal blog site or on the mud you run. There's nothing in the license that says you can't solicit for donations on the mud, and in any context a true donation isn't covered by the license. Sorry, it's just utter nonsense that receiving a donation becomes profit based on where the money is spent after the fact. It's even *less* of a donation if the money has to be spent in a certain way in the first place. If it's *actually a donation* it isn't subject to this license in any way. If you make a diku based mud and someone who plays it decides to give you 100 million dollars to make your life better– you do not have to spend it on server costs. And there's no crime and it doesn't break the license. If you had to spend that 100 million dollars on server costs, and the person who gave it to you expected that (and expected higher quality of production), it might break the license, because it's close to no longer being a donation. Can you spend your own money on those things? Sure. Do you have to? Nope. Donations are your money and aside from the mechanics a license governs. A license, for example, couldn't make you take a vow of poverty to use it.

Unless your goal is to earn money and not having a fair game, yes.

I suggest you re-read the quotes. There were two very clear restrictions given by the authors:

1) you can't use the game directly for donations, and:

2) you can't give players a tangible modification within the game in return for donations.


Really? Looks fine to me - "receive" as in "get something". You should not "get something" for donations. Probably wouldn't be the way I'd phrase it, but I never thought twice about it until you mentioned it.

It's not an everyday usage, being a little formal, but it is grammatically correct and you are indeed making a subconscious edit error. Here, he's referring to his opinion that players should not receive something for donating. That is, a donation should be a donation, not a sale.

Ah, err, that's exactly what Crat went on to say.

KaVir made the same mistake in reading Crat's post. I suppose you both misunderstood the "we" in the beginning of his post and didn't pay enough attention to the rest of the post.

Quite.

"I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive." - Acts 20:35

Perhaps I too a translator wanting am.

Wrong. Read the post.

Right. Read Crat's post. :shrug:
(we can play this game for a while, hmm?)

In any case, the phrasing of "receiving for donations" is pretty awkward – a noun is sorely lacking.