The idea occurred to me suddenly. A foundation for free muds. They could pool resources, have a directory, the ability to search based on criteria. In addition, they could pool resources and split a dedicated server(s) to cut costs. There could be a developer community. License violators could be ejected based on a voting mechanism.
The foundation could take donations and act as an official non-profit. Open records. Then it could spend the funds on servers and encourage free mud development with free hosting to fledgling developers who present concepts and ideas to the collective.
In addition, if we pool resources, it might be possible to have an actual advertising campaign for muds, eventually. Have muds in the foundation put the logo on their website. The website could be a directory of muds and a mission statement. Eventually, it might be possible to run magazine advertisements or advertise on popular gaming websites.
i'd answer your question but im too lazy to even use good grammer, spelin, pubnctuation, my own code, or proper;ly research licensing, and i accidentally the whole thing
i'd answer your question but im too lazy to even use good grammer, spelin, pubnctuation, my own code, or proper;ly research licensing, and i accidentally the whole thing
also you would just steal my codes and ideas
I'm not even sure if this is a jab at me or not.
26 Nov, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
We kind of already have all that on a much larger, less centralized scale. People still offer free server space for muds, we share our code via repositories, and we advertise via mud portals…. It's a grand idea, but doesn't seem necessary.
It's a demonstration of some 60 to 80 percent of the stuff you'd be dealing with with such a "foundation".
Handling such people is actually work, and it's thankless and frustrating and a timesucking chore for no particularly good outcome, since they'll not actually turn out anything worthwhile, for the most part.
The other 40 to 20 percent will be awesome such that you won't really need to interact with them, and they would have found some other way to support their hobby anyway if it weren't for your "foundation", so your support is actually not necessary for good producers to produce good product.
What you're describing is basically bureaucratic overhead and a melting pot of political strife and confusion over how to allocate finite resources to an infinitely hungry set of open mouths. You'd have to pay me money to help you do that.
I like the idea of helping people out. Setting up a foundation is not an automatically bad idea. Setting up the foundation you describe, with no practice in the skills needed to make a money-handling body work, is a terrible idea.
It's not a bad idea in itself, but I think the mud community would be better off at this point if you put your time into making a standalone great service or resource.
27 Nov, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
One of the reasons why foundations work is that they get real money to pay people real salaries to do real work (the unpleasantness of which Crat described). Unless something similar could be achieved, such a foundation would essentially be a volunteer organization with unclear returns despite clearly onerous work.
The foundation could take donations and act as an official non-profit. Open records. Then it could spend the funds on servers and encourage free mud development with free hosting to fledgling developers who present concepts and ideas to the collective.
In addition, if we pool resources, it might be possible to have an actual advertising campaign for muds, eventually. Have muds in the foundation put the logo on their website. The website could be a directory of muds and a mission statement. Eventually, it might be possible to run magazine advertisements or advertise on popular gaming websites.
Just an idea. Anyone think it has merit?