I thought we had established that we were talking about the aggregate case…

Not really (as we don't know what Mabus's exact situation is), but it doesn't really matter as I've already answered it for both cases.

You were replying to me, no, so does it not make the most sense to reply to what I describe, and not what I don't? Well, anyhow, I'm ready to agree to disagree on this issue since pursuing it further seems like a complete waste of time. :smile:

If you're talking about this statement:



…then I did already answer. I said that that it depends on the relationship between the parties; if the contractor was developing the software "in house" then I would find it unusual, but if they were developing the software externally then I would not find it unusual. It sounds to me like Mabus's situation falls into the latter category, and so I don't find it unusual for him to want to license his software.

Why is it that I have the impression that this is going in circles? Hadn't we already established that the question referred to the aggregate? :sigh: Well, hey, whatever. :shrug:

It doesn't make sense to give an aggregate answer. It would be like asking "Do you find it unusual for people to have hairy nipples?" and then refusing to accept the answer "it depends on their gender; if they're male then no, if they're female then yes"

Hehe, sometimes female too… Depending on where in the world you are :P

-Syn

I'm sorry, but 100k for a non-exclusive mud license is preposterous. It's a joke, who is going to pay $100,000 for a non exclusive license to a mud? Has anyone ever purchased a license of it?

$100k even for an exclusive MUD license (i.e. purchasing the IP) sounds a little surprising, never mind for a non-exclusive license. I'm also curious to hear how much success that business venture has had…

Sorry, my mistake…

It's $100K per year.

http://phantasmal.sourceforge.net/DGD/Sk...

That sounds even more preposterous…

http://www.skotos.net/about/pr/Feb05_199...

"BERKELEY, CA, Feb. 5, 1999 – Skotos Tech, an online game company located near the University of California at Berkeley, today announced that it had acquired a license to DGD, a powerful online game server. The licensing agreement was signed by Christopher Allen, President & CEO of Skotos Tech, and Michael S. Oswald, General Counsel to Acuity Corporation. "I’ve had my eyes on DGD for a while," said Christopher Allen. "Its acquisition will provide Skotos Tech with a solid development base and will substantially reduce our time to market."

Also:

"IChat used DGD to create a powerful chat server, which was licensed by Yahoo! and other well-known Internet companies."

It's worth mentioning that they didn't just purchase a license to use it in their game. They purchased a license to do almost whatever they wanted with it. The $100k/year figure seems very different all of a sudden:

But the point was that they bought a licence, and not exclusive rights.

Great! You have one piece of anecdotal evidence: a clear winner for showing the usual case! :rolleyes:

Anyhow, the point I was making was that your posts made it sound like somebody just bought a license to use the MUD. It didn't sound like somebody had bought the right to do almost everything with the MUD.

Then show some evidence backing up your claim, please. :rolleyes:

Are you referring to my claim that the usual case is that IP is transferred? That claim is trivially true if you agree that the usual case is the employee (which, unless you think there are more 3rd-party developers than employees, you agree to).

Are you seriously suggesting that there are more instances of people selling non-exclusive licenses than there instances of a person being paid to produce work that belongs to the paying company? KaVir at least distinguishes based on different cases…

Firstly, I never claimed it was "the usual case" for mud developers to sell licences rather than exclusive rights, only that it wasn't unusual.

Secondly, I cited three licences - the other two being DikuII ($900 per licence) and Rapture ($10K per licence).

Now it's your turn to provide a list of mud codebases where the developer has sold exclusive rights.



They bought a non-exclusive licence, and it was exclusive vs non-exclusive rights that we were debating.



Not within the context of muds, it isn't. How many muds developers are classified as "employees" under the common law of agency?

Furthermore, we've already established that Mabus is (almost certainly) not an employee. That's why we've been talking about independent contractors and not employees.

You know, you should have said so earlier… if that is what you have been trying to say, then you haven't been arguing against what I've been trying to say all this time, and we could have saved a lot of time and effort…


Heh – have you even been reading what I've been writing? For starters, I've been talking about developers in general – I never mentioned anything about MUD developers in particular. So given that I never argued that MUD coders sell exclusive rights, I do not see why the burden of proving this statement is being landed in my lap…


OK. I am going to say this for the last time, Don Quixote. When I say "usual" without further context, it means the aggregate case. Not a particular context. Not the MUD context. If I meant a particular context, I would say so. If you keep failing to recognize that, there's not much I can do but conclude that you're only interested in arguing with straw men, not me.

I was arguing against your claims that "It is unusual to be paid by somebody to do work and yet maintain complete and exclusive rights rights to your work", that it's "certainly unusual for e.g. consultants", that "The idea is rather preposterous in most situations", and that "it is still unusual for somebody to hire somebody else and have the person hired retain full rights".

That was the reason for my arguments about it not being "unusual".



Yes. You attempted to discredit my argument by claiming that only one mud sold licences (despite the fact that I'd already listed three). If you're going to attack my stance based specifically on mud development, you should be prepared to defend your own stance in the same context.



Such a gross overgeneralisation renders any discussion worthless. You might as well argue that it's "unusual" for people to speak English, "unusual" for people to live in America and "unusual" for people to use the internet.