"I feel it is important that I make clear how I see the limits of the license; You should know 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." -- Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
Saw that on TMC, so was there more to Hans' post? It sounds like he says he doesn't care if people donate to fund hosting or sell game shirts/cups etc, but no perks (as we've all taken that part of his intent to be). That seem like it to you? Reason I ask is heck, a donate $5 to the mudbill button on the website wouldn't hurt at times. But the last thing I'd want to do is join the Mercthevia crowd. Opinions wanted ;)
Ack, it's chopping out any carriage returns, nasty. Bug, squish it!
Posted By: Vopisk on
06/16/06 at 06:34 PM
That is what the statement above atests to yes. If one receives donations (for the purpose of running and continuing the game) then it's fine, if they reward players in-game for their donations, then they fail to be donations and become pay-for-perks. Thus, commercializing the game, even if all those pay-for-perks money goes straight back into the game too.
I think what he's really trying to emphasize here is that the game should be played in the game, and one should not be able to "buy" a good character. Not only is this unfair to those who cannot afford "a good character", but it also stands the potential of ruining some poor kid's life as he spends all his money on being "Ub3r 1337" in your MUD and forgets to pay his tuition at school. While this most likely would never come down on you for neglegence or some other legal ruling that would force you to pay for little Billy's education, do you want to risk it?
Also as an aside, I think he makes it clear that it is perfectly acceptable to sell game merchandise (i.e. hats, t-shirts and the like) for real, hard money and this money obviously, his license has no control over, because the specific game implementation is your intellectual property and his license does not apply. But once again he specifies that any receipt, by you (who are running a DIKU), of real money -CANNOT- be traded for in-game perks. Of course, this sort of thing not only costs more in legal fees than it is worth, but it's also terribly hard to prove something that exists only over the internet. Those running these "illegal" DIKUs could always just say that they rewarded the players for "good RP" or "being a badass" and the money had nothing to do with it. There's not a lot you can do to prove otherwise because all of the information in those regards would be on their computers.
Just some of my thoughts on this WAY over-dead horse.
Vopisk
Posted By: Skol on
06/16/06 at 07:09 PM
Hm, that helps. I'd been under the impression (until Tyche's post on TMC) that even hosting donations were considered against the license. Seems they're not.
Posted By: Skol on
06/16/06 at 07:10 PM
Ps. On the comment thing. How to get separate paragraphs? Everything I type it strips the carriage returns from and leaves one block.
Ie. This was separate.
This was 'enter'... (testing ignore this ;p)
Posted By: Skol on
06/16/06 at 07:10 PM
Oooooh K, now it works. Rofl, I'm going to crawl back in my cave now. ;p
re: CRs being eaten
Posted By: Icculus on
06/16/06 at 09:06 PM
Out of curiosity, what OS are you using? I'm not sure it has anything to do with the issue but may as they have different end of line markers ( Mac I believe is \r\n, Unix is \n and Dos/windows is \n\r ). I don't recall if I am manually stripping anything, will have to check.
But remember that's only Diku (and Merc as Merc really didn't add restrictions). Circle explicitly prohibits donations of any kind. Some of the Merc derivatives add more restrictions.
Posted By: Skol on
06/16/06 at 11:16 PM
Andy - Mac OSX 10.4.6 Tiger, it seems to be working now though. I'm not sure if anything changed, or if it was simply the cut/paste lost part of the \n or \r hehe.
Tyche - Thanks much, I'll have to read those up. I run one in the Diku/Merc/Rom line (Rom 2.3 upgraded, modified like all the rest for about 10 years etc).
Ps. I'm going to get a shirt that reads ROM (heavily modified) as a joke, omg I'm sick of seeing that label ;p.
Circle vs. Merc
Posted By: Fizban on
09/03/08 at 12:21 AM
I got curious after reading the comment from Hans and emailed Elson asking if he'd think about removing the limitation of donations along with a copy-paste of Hans's comment and explaining that currently Circle is more prohibitive than DIKU or Merc and if that wasn't the actual intent, and the intent was only to better word what he interpreted as the spirit of the DIKU license to think about making an alteration to the license. Got a very non-committal reply which equated to basically that he'd give it some though but no actual real response yet.
Posted By: Skol on
09/03/08 at 06:11 PM
I saw that Fiz, yeah sounds like he's flat out 'done' with Circle or anything along with it. Sucks that he couldn't take the time to re-clarify and re-issue the license.
