Empire of the Iguanadons

So there's apparently some controversy brewing over Kayle and I exercising our legal rights under copyright law to have the SmaugFUSS distribution removed from MudBytes. Tangentially this seems to extend to AFKMud as well and supposedly some horrid dangerous precedent is now being set by this. If this bores you to tears or makes you want to pull your hair out, don't feel bad. For some odd reason there was even mention of QSFP but I fail to see why as it's not even related.

First off, let me get this out of the way now: I am not a lawyer and my analysis does not constitute legal advice. This is merely one author's opinion on the matter based on my own research into copyright law. If you have an IP related issue regarding licensing and copyright, consult an IP attorney and don't blame me or the MUD community for passing off conjecture as real advice.

So to get things rolling, we need something to analyze.

The DIKU License:

/***************************************************************************
 *  Copyright (C) 1990, 1991                                               *
 *  All Rights Reserved                                                    *
 ***************************************************************************/

                             DikuMud License

                      Program & Concept created by


Sebastian Hammer
Prss. Maries Alle 15, 1
1908 Frb. C.
DENMARK
(email quinn@freja.diku.dk)

Michael Seifert
Nr. Soeg. 37C, 1, doer 3
1370 Copenhagen K.
DENMARK
(email seifert@freja.diku.dk)

Hans Henrik St{rfeldt
Langs} 19
3500 V{rl|se
DENMARK
(email bombman@freja.diku.dk)

Tom Madsen
R|de Mellemvej 94B, 64
2300 Copenhagen S.
DENMARK
(email noop@freja.diku.dk)

Katja Nyboe
Kildeg}rdsvej 2
2900 Hellerup
31 62 82 84
DENMARK
(email katz@freja.diku.dk)


This document contains the rules by which you can use, alter or publish
parts of DikuMud. DikuMud has been created by the above five listed persons
in their spare time, at DIKU (Computer Science Instutute at Copenhagen
University). You are legally bound to follow the rules described in this
document.

Rules:

   !! DikuMud is NOT Public Domain, shareware, careware or the like !!

   You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in
   any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for
   distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge
   for "sending the disk" or "just for the disk" etc.
   By breaking these rules you violate the agreement between us and the
   University, and hence will be sued.

   You may not remove any copyright notices from any of the documents or
   sources given to you.

   This license must *always* be included "as is" if you copy or give
   away any part of DikuMud (which is to be done as described in this
   document).

   If you publish *any* part of dikumud, we as creators must appear in the
   article, and the article must be clearly copyrighted subject to this
   license. Before publishing you must first send us a message, by
   snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us what, where and when you are
   publishing (remember to include your address, name etc.)

   If you wish to setup a version of DikuMud on any computer system, you
   must send us a message , by snail-mail or e-mail, and inform us where
   and when you are running the game. (remember to include 
   your address, name etc.)


   Any running version of DikuMud must include our names in the login
   sequence. Furthermore the "credits" command shall always cointain
   our name, addresses, and a notice which states we have created DikuMud.

   You are allowed to alter DikuMud, source and documentation as long as
   you do not violate any of the above stated rules.


Regards,



The DikuMud Group


Note:

We hope you will enjoy DikuMud, and encourage you to send us any reports
on bugs (when you find 'it'). Remember that we are all using our spare
time to write and improve DikuMud, bugs, etc. - and changes will take their
time. We have so far put extremely many programming hours into this project.
If you make any major improvements on DikuMud we would be happy to
hear from you. As you will naturally honor the above rules, you will receive
new updates and improvements made to the game.

The MERC License:
[code=]Merc Release 2.1
Sunday 01 August 1993

Furey mec@shell.portal.com
Hatchet hatchet@uclink.berkeley.edu
Kahn michael@uclink.berkeley.edu



=== Copyright and License Terms

Diku Mud is copyright (C) 1990, 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Michael Seifert,
Hans Henrik St{rfeldt, Tom Madsen, and Katja Nyboe. Their license agreement
is in the file 'license.doc'.

Merc Diku Mud is a derivative of the original Diku Mud and is subject to their
copyright and license agreement. Merc Diku Mud contains substantial
enhancements to Diku Mud. These enhancements are copyright 1992, 1993 by
Michael Chastain, Michael Quan, and Mitchell Tse.

In order to use Merc you must follow the Diku license and our license. The
exact terms of the Diku license are in the file 'license.doc'. A summary of
these terms is:

-- No resale or operation for profit.
-- Original author's names must appear in login sequence.
-- The 'credits' command must report original authors.
-- You must notify the Diku creators that you are operating a Diku mud.

Our license terms are:

-- Copyrights must remain in original source.
-- 'Help merc' must report our help text, as shipped.

Notice that our license terms don't include keeping our names in the login
sequence. If you want to keep a line in there referring to Merc, or referring
to us by name (Furey, Hatchet, and Kahn), we'd appreciate that, but we don't
require it. But you must keep the original Diku authors in the login sequence.

If you do not follow these license terms, we will ask you to comply. If that
doesn't work, then we will talk to your system administrators (not about your
running a mud, but on the grounds that you're using our copyrighted software
without permission).

These are very generous terms for any software. If you don't want to accept
them, feel free to run some other software, or write your own.[/code]

The SMAUG License:

 ****************************************************************************
 * [S]imulated [M]edieval [A]dventure multi[U]ser [G]ame      |   \\._.//   *
 * -----------------------------------------------------------|   (0...0)   *
 * SMAUG 1.4 (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by Derek Snider |    ).:.(    *
 * -----------------------------------------------------------|    {o o}    *
 * SMAUG code team: Thoric, Altrag, Blodkai, Narn, Haus,      |   / ' ' \   *
 * Scryn, Rennard, Swordbearer, Gorog, Grishnakh, Nivek,      |~'~.VxvxV.~'~*
 * Tricops and Fireblade                                      |             *
 * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *

=== Copyright and License Terms

Diku Mud is copyright (C) 1990, 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Michael Seifert,
Hans Henrik St{rfeldt, Tom Madsen, and Katja Nyboe.  Their license agreement
is in the file 'license.diku'.

Merc Diku Mud is a derivative of the original Diku Mud.  Merc Diku Mud contains
substantial enhancements to Diku Mud.  These enhancements are copyright 1992,
1993 by Michael Chastain, Michael Quan, and Mitchell Tse.  Their license
agreement is in the file 'license.merc'.

SMAUG is a derivative of the version 2.1 distribution of Merc Diku Mud.
SMAUG contains substantial enhancements to Merc Diku Mud, including some
features of the original Diku Mud that were removed by the Merc team.

In order to use SMAUG you must follow the Diku license and our license.  The
exact terms of the Diku license are in the file 'license.diku'.  A summary of
these terms is:

        -- No resale or operation for profit.
        -- Original author's names must appear in login sequence.
        -- The 'credits' command must report original authors.
        -- You must notify the Diku creators that you are operating a Diku mud.

Our license terms are:

        -- Copyrights must remain in original source.
        -- 'Help smaug' must report our help text, as shipped.
        -- A mention that this is a SMAUG based MUD must appear in the
           login sequence.
        -- You must not block access to your SMAUG mud from the SMAUG
           development site (game.org).
        -- You must not operate your mud with any contraband area files
           and must remove any areas in question immediately upon request.
        -- You are requested to notify us that you are operating a SMAUG mud,
           to include the address of the mud, and whether or not you want us
           to put a link to your mud on our SMAUG mudlist webpage.

SMAUG makes no effort to retain compatibility with any original Diku code,
Merc code, any patches, upgrades or code snippets designed for any Diku
derivative other than one designed for SMAUG.  (See 'smaug.txt').

The question at hand is distribution rights. Do Kayle and I have the right to revoke distribution rights? According to copyright law, only we as copyright holders ever had those rights to begin with. Throic and his team in turn hold those rights to Smaug, the Merc guys hold those for Merc, and the Diku team hold those rights for the Diku codebase. Without a license of any sort, there are no rights beyond those given by law to the authors.

You require a license in order to grant rights to others. Restricting rights is legally redundant as nobody has them to begin with, so right off the bat, any clauses which restrict are out. The DIKU license, which is the root of the tree, only has this to say:



If you give away a copy, their license must be included. This is the only clause which specifically mentions distribution rights of any sort that aren't a restriction. This is pretty shaky ground to stand on since it only implies that you have the right. An explicit clause stating you have distribution rights is almost certainly necessary. Given the language barrier issues we can't even be entirely sure what this clause is saying. The license is also likely written with Danish law in mind rather than US law, so there's no way to know without consulting an attorney what rights this license is giving you under US law. Remember, copyright has international treaties covering it, but that isn't necessarily true of licensing which many people regard as part of civil contract law.

The rest of the things mentioned in the DIKU license are irrelevant since they deal with use, modification, and publication in "articles" which I'm assuming means newspapers, magazines, and the like. So let's move on to Merc.



Those two additional clauses meant to cover rights granted under the Merc license do not pertain to distribution. So there's really nothing to see here. Pay attention ROM users, as so far you're not any better off than Smaug users. I digress.

From the Smaug license:


Again, none of Smaug's additional terms pertain to distribution. So again there's nothing really to see here. For the curious, the AFKMud license is also guilty of mentioning restrictions on what you can't do and mentions nothing about your distribution rights. Unless you take that "do whatever the hell you want with it" clause literally.

So where does that leave us? Playing dangerous legal games with nothing but conjecture as an anchor, that's where. The entire DIKU branch distribution chain is hinging on an iffy clause that doesn't come right out and explicitly grant you anything, and under the law, you explicitly have nothing. So we come right back to the rights given to copyright holders under the law, one of which is the right of distribution.

Kayle and I have chosen to remove the SmaugFUSS and AFKMud codebases from MudBytes as per our rights under the law. The site rules governing uploading only grant them a non-exclusive right to distribute anything that is submitted there. They do not grant that right in an irrevocable fashion. I should know, I wrote the rules there. So if they don't like it, then they need to change the wording of the rules to include "irrevocable". chances are that wouldn't hold up though even if it was there as an irrevocable license can only be enforced either via a signature on a signed document or a legally recognized e-signature on an electronic document. MudBytes collects neither.

Bottom line: The DIKU license does not bar us from exercising our copyright rights.
.........................
"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

While I don't quite understand, and am not entirely sure that I want to know, what prompted this urge to have SmaugFUSS and AFKMUD removed from MudBytes, based upon what you've presented I also don't see what the issue is.

As you've said:

It appears that the Diku team originally implied the right to distribute their software and the Merc guys left that aspect as it was while Thoric also didn't offer additional information either way on the matter.

Therefore, anyone who submits a modified version (derivative) of anything directly descendant from those three holds the copyright on their own modifications and can thus have full say over distribution rights form that point forward.

But I'm no lawyer and my legal interpretation of this sort of thing is worth the electronic pixels you've expended in reading it as far as any court in any land is likely to be concerned.

I'm not clear on what sort of "horrid dangerous precedent" could be involved as I can't imagine that it's even the first time someone's pulled a distribution from a site.

I certainly can't imagine what any of it even might have to do with QSFP unless Davion and Kiasyn are afraid that your next step will be to revoke their right to use QSFP as the basis for MudBytes itself.

In a nutshell, when they booted me from the administration, I issued what may as well have been a cease & desist notice to remove all of my submissions from the site as I did not want my projects associated with a site run the way they run it. I mistakenly took Davion at his word when he said he had complied and never bothered to follow up. Kayle and I were talking about the last round of ridiculous drama that erupted there and he told me he had SmaugFUSS taken down - which came as a surprise to me since I'd already asked for that to be done.

Tyche apparently decided to make a big blow up over the whole thing today or just recently or something. I got an email from a concerned party about the copyright status on SmaugFUSS which prompted me to check the MB site and found a silly flamewar going over what Tyche and KaVir both think they know about what rights were granted in the license. Since the relevant ones are all now posted to read, you can see they're both playing a dangerous legal game.

The DIKU team may have intended for distribution to be normal. Their license does not explicitly grant this right though.

You are correct on the next two though as neither the Merc team nor the Smaug team ever granted distribution rights for their additional material. Yeah, that's a huge oops if you ask me, but it's never been brought up before. Things like this only seem to come up when someone exercises their rights under the law and nobody wants that to be possible.

I don't know what horrid dangerous precedent they're after either, but they keep mentioning one.

QSFP has nothing to do with this because it's licensed under the GPL and I couldn't revoke their right to use it even if I wanted to.

Well now I understand why this is being brought up now instead of months ago at least.

Wasn't Tyche throwing a snit, not to put too nice a spin on things, about you making changes to the Smaug distributions (for the betterment of them by making them able to be compiled under a current version of GCC) hosted there a major factor in the meltdown of MudMagic too? (KaVir likes to play mud-related copyright attorney on TMC from time to time, so no real surprise to see he's involved in this one too. Nice enough guy with a fantastic claim to fame within the mud community, but we've all got our faults and that happens to be one of his. Granted, he comes across as being extremely well versed and full of excellent wisdom, but I don't believe him to be a seasoned lawyer in the field of copyright law anymore than most of us.)

No, but it does at least sort of imply the intent since you certainly wouldn't be concerned about keeping the license in the package when making a copy or giving a copy away if you can't distribute a copy of the package to begin with.

It probably was a big oops, in every sense, but it's done and well beyond them at this point since it was taken for granted over the last dozen years or so. Amazing, isn't it?

I have to admit to a sense of morbid curiosity in anticipating what horrid dangerous precedent will be announced as having come from this.

Then I can't imagine why they'd even have brought it up because that's the only logical reason I could think of, but I do know they often enjoy taking things way beyond anything a reasonable person could construe as logic. *shrug*

Tyche never complained about that, and trust me if he had I'd have dinged him for it because he translated Merc into C++ under the Murk++ name.

The license implies a lot of things. All of them weakly and without enough strength to base years of work on safely. If they chose to, they could crack the whip and shut down the entire codebase development community in a heartbeat. Nothing you could do about it.

I am waiting patiently for signs of this terrible precedent. Unless the terrible precedent is that one can in fact assert their legal rights in the MUD community. Now wouldn't that be a shock? Regardless, Merc and Smaug do not grant any rights of distribution to the derivative works at all so the entire Merc branch is built on a legal house of cards. Including Rom btw, which seems to somehow never get discussed in these little snits.

The only reason Tyche brought up QSFP that I can tell was simply to take a swipe in my direction. Perhaps he wasn't aware it's GPL, but he clearly didn't even do an ounce of research into it before commenting. Which leads one to think he hasn't done that for the DIKU license issue either.

Another thing about the GPL is that it's usually only applicable to binary distributions and makes people who use code licensed with it distribute the source code. It may be he tacked that on because he realizes the GPL may not have any real weight with what is already a pure source code distribution.

I haven't really been paying much attention to MB recently, does this have anything to do with Tyche and his distribution of RSmaug (Smaug in Ruby)? Which was odd in itself as I never associated Tyche with Smaug whatsoever.

First I've heard of any RSmaug thing and it never got mentioned so I don't know.

Buncha filth. Translation: You forfeit all rights to your code just cuz you put it on the internet. So neener neener to you. Try that with the music you steal Kavir and stop acting like a dick cuz someone finally stood against the community raping developers' rights!

Hmm, I don't know that it's worth dredging up the old Kyndig stuff, but I was thinking a big part of the issue had started with Tyche complaining about your handling of the Smaug related repository within MudMagic's overall repository, even it later turned out to be a misunderstanding or some such.

Yes, that's true enough, but the generally held belief at this point would be that it was implied by that statement if nowhere else.

Who knows, again it wouldn't be the first time the in-crowd at MB got their dander up over something sort of "out there". *shrug*
It is odd that ROM gets so little attention regarding its license, but it's used by a pretty different crowd anyway so maybe it's just a reflection of that difference.

I see.

I suppose that's also equally plausible.


I've not followed anything at MB directly in quite awhile now, so I certainly can't say.
That is odd, I believe that I recall Tyche maintaining his own mud repository of sorts, so I could see an interest in smaug on general principle, but I thought he had a codebase (or multiple codebases?) that he created and maintains of his own that's very unlike smaug already.


Unless this quote was taken entirely out of context and you didn't bother to share the context that makes it mean what you're saying it translates to, I don't see that in what you've quoted at all. In theory, he's raising a valid and reasonable concern, once a codebase developer demonstrates willingness to revoke a license based on a personal issue it does raise a very valid questionableness to future and current other users of that codebase as to whether they could potentially find themselves also having the license revoked from them as well. In this case, however, I have trouble imagining that it wasn't clearly pointed out that this situation only effects MB and only because of the extensive troubles between the involved parties. On the other hand, while I agree that Samson (and, by extension, Kayle) should absolutely have the right to have the SmaugFUSS and AFKMUD codebases removed from MB's repository without difficulty, I do also have to question the wisdom of doing so. I believe I can easily enough understand their motivations and rationale, but I also think that Samson had previously gone to some notable lengths to personally ensure that the repository at MB would be one of the single easiest to use to find as much as possible and thus it might be better for the community as a whole to allow those codebases to remain there. The actions and attitudes of the site were more than a little concerning, so it's a tough call.

Then you'd be a fucking dickhead for doing that. You also prove that you think developers have no actual right to control distribution of their work. So all those godwars games get to fuck you in the ass and you can't say shit or else you're a fucking hypocrite. The mud community. Just another piratebay!

*Purposely ignoring Anon's unnecessary drivel* Seriously, where's those Imperial Guards? Or are we keeping Anon around for the humor?

So, I actually took the time this morning to read through the thread on MB regarding this and this is all I have to say about it: Tyche needs to look up the words "use" and "distribute" as he seems to be up in arms that they mean the same thing. How he decided to 'warn' users that their license can be revoked on a whim because you asked MB to stop distributing the codebase is beyond me.

Yes you do have every right to ask them to stop distributing the codebase. Kayle handled the situation very well, (although he really needs to reign himself in and not keep getting emotionally defensive).

You do know that SmaugFUSS 1.7 and 1.8 are still up there, right? As well as SWR1.2 FUSS. I think I saw in one of Kayle's posts you guys wanted all of FUSS gone.

Hanaisse,

You hit the nail on the head. If you really look at the licensing carefully, you'll see that it's obviously an "agreement" between the MUD operator and the copyright holder. At no time does a file host enter into that agreement, so at no time can a file host claim rights granted under it. Therefore they have no right to distribute anyone's work in the absence of permission, which we have revoked already. MudBytes is not a party to the license.

If they want to keep playing these games then I guess that means they want to make a legal issue of it. If they won't respect a C&D then perhaps their provider will pay attention to a DMCA takedown notice. We asked that ALL material from the FUSS project be removed and if any of it is still there they are in violation of our copyright. Plain and simple.

As far as Anon, if you want to see what Kavir said, it's here: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topic&t=2561&p=42404#p42404

Apparently you guys are my monkeys or something now. The problem with his argument is that he wants all of the rights and protections of the GPL without the actual legal GPL being attached. To bully developers by insisting that they have no right to remove something from distribution is ludicrous. Yes, that is the argument he's thinly trying to make by saying he's going to go around warning users not to use the base because we exercised our legal rights under the law. That's intimidation.

I suppose that I can reign myself in too and also ignore Anonymous on this one since we now have a much more reliable source for information about the situation as it is existing on MB.

So the whole uproar at MB this time is basically that Tyche decided to have a snit because he's equating a revocation of the license to distribute with the potential for a revocation of the license to use? I can see the potential perception of "if they'd revoke one permission for personal reasons, what's to stop them from revoking another permission for personal reasons later", but I think everyone involved (and quite a few who are not at all even remotely involved as well) surely must know by now what this is really primarily about and that it is a very isolated case which has nothing to do with license to use.

I'm glad to hear that Kayle conducted himself well, that goes a long way toward future potential users of the codebase getting the right impression despite what amounts to negative publicity. Unfortunately, the emotional defensiveness is a problem for him that he's needed to work on for quite awhile, but, fortunately, I believe he's already well aware of it and I'm lead to believe that he's actually made good strides toward self-improvement in that area.

Hmm, I'd had the impression from the below quote (taken from the first two sentences of this very blog's original post) that they were only talking about SmaugFUSS and AFKMUD, but I did expect that to mean all versions of each rather than just the latest version:

Frankly, I would expect that if they'd only asked for the most recent version of the distributions to be removed there'd be no basis, even in the panic hungry minds of certain MB regulars, for any of this hoopla at all as they could claim there was a problem with the distribution files that had been uploaded or some such and that they were expecting to rectify the situation at their convenience - end of all possible arguments.

Yes, my original demand back in October was for the removal of all of my material as well as all material from the FUSS project. As has been pointed out, they ignored that demand. Kayle's demand was met with similar ignorance as some of the material remains and I'm gathering the links now to include with the letter if something isn't done about this.

The entire argument about informing people of the precedent is just them grabbing on to an opportunity to bash me some more. I'm hardly surprised by that. There's no actual valid legal argument to be had in any of it. Copyright grants us distribution rights. Not them. It's so cut and dry there shouldn't be an argument at all.

If you all remember correctly, I revoked license on MB a few years back due to post modifying my packages. This was not something explicit in the license to say you could not do, but something that I felt strong enough about to put and end to. The precedent has been set that they will comply with the wishes of the copyright holder and remove packages when license to distribute has been revoked.

Just another day at MB, bunch of whiners with no lives have to concoct some huge debate just to give themselves a reason to exist. In all, this is all rather pathetic.

The_Fury

Samson, looks like we were posting roughly at the same time again.

That makes perfect sense actually. The file host isn't subject to the license because they're not using the software just hosting it for the person who uploaded it. To say otherwise would be easily akin to purchasing a hot new software game and then trying to hold the trucking company that delivered it to the store responsible for it containing a bad installation CD... ???

I hope they're not trying to turn this into some sort of international legal issue, that could get very expensive and full of hassles for everyone involved. Even having to send a DMCA to the ISP would be a black mark against them that would be hard to recover from, especially regarding files their hosting in a repository that was supposed to be the final solution for mud repositories...

hmm.. interesting, so it seems that KaVir is reading your blog now, though insulting your blog's visitors/members seems highly uncalled for as well.

I'm nobody's monkey thankyouverymuch! Especially since you're not even paying me a ration of bananas.
Legally, I believe that would qualify as intimidation of potential users and harassment toward you and Kayle, in the current stage it's blackmail/extortion along the lines of "if you don't change your stated intentions I'll make it much more difficult to conduct your business by warning all your potential new product users away" and possibly defamation (libel?) toward the rest of us who participate in your blog site. At the very least, it's rather unnecessarily rude and very unprofessional. If we wanted to sue him over it though, honestly it'd be a very weak case since he didn't specifically provide a victim though. Which is not say that it's not defamation but rather that we'd have a hard time taking him to court over it. (See Dancing with Lawyers for clarification on that point.)

@The_Fury: Yes, I remember that. It's also worth noting again that your request falls into the same category as ours. Distribution from a website that isn't a party to the underlying codebase's license. I think this is a critical point that everyone seems to be missing in their zeal to tear Kayle and I down over it. If they are not a party to the license, then they have absolutely no rights extended to them by copyright law at all, aside from the agreement made in the user sign-up process, which only grants them a non-exclusive distribution right. That right can be legally revoked at any time and has no impact on the validity of the Diku license classes at all.

@Conner: There's no international incident to be had here. Kayle and I are US citizens. MudBytes is hosted on a US server, California to be specific. The entire affair falls squarely under US copyright law. So KaVir's interpretations of it hold no weight. He's German.

Ok, this posting over each other has the potential to get confusing, so I'm going back to specific quoting...


I suppose if that's the next step that they're demonstrating a need for, well.. one does what one must.


How sad for them then if they really felt the need to turn something very straightforward into a debacle solely for the drama value. Especially if it really is all about another chance to drag you back to their stage just to bash you.


Ah, but if you recall, that was when Samson was still a member of the administration..


Alas, it seems that I'm forced to concur, at least about the fact that this is proving entirely pathetic.

Edited because I typo'd a bbcode bracket. *sigh*

Again though, the administrator responsible for insuring that MudBytes complied with that request is no longer with MudBytes and that is undoubtedly a major contributing factor in the fact that this has even become an issue to begin with.


Hmm, so the New Zealander and the Canadian are trying to run a site from servers in the U.S. and getting legal advice from a German about US copyright law regarding the handling of a request from a pair of Americans... sounds like the premise of a parody movie. :D

Funny how that works, isn't it? I may not be a lawyer or even a legal expert, but I've done enough research of my own into copyright law to know they're on dangerous legal ground and that all of the arguments currently being made are based in fantasy land.

What's more, they've directed Linode (their provider) to ignore emails from me because of one erroneous spam report I sent them. When you're getting email from a server with a mudbytes.net address, it's generally safe to assume it's coming from the real one. In this case it wasn't, I apologized to Linode for wasting their time, and refiled the complaint with VPSLand instead. Yes, the former provider for the site is so incompetent that they left the account up and running and able to process scripts which were emailing logwatch reports to me. Why should I have assumed this to be the case though? It wouldn't have had to go to their ISP if they'd bothered to actually look into the problem to begin with.

Why do I mention this? It shows a pattern of willful ignorance to legitimate requests to cease unwanted activity. It also demonstrates that they are willing to resort to libel to protect themselves.



It would be funny as hell if the whole thing weren't so sad and pathetic. I guess that probably explains why they're in such an uproar to suppress the issue and paint Kayle and I as the demons. A New Zealander and a Canadian running a website based in the USA, receiving copyright advice from a German on a license written by 5 Danish citizens based on an agreement they held with their former university and rooted in Danish civil law. With advice from a Dutch citizen claiming there is no case thrown in. Comical to say the least, especially when they all claim to know for a fact that their particular interpretation is the right one.

I certainly see irony in it. :D


They told Linode to ignore emails from you because of that? That's utterly incredulous.. even more so that Linode would have chosen to comply with such a request as that would be potentially endangering Linode's operations...


Unfortunately, that was established with the whole situation regarding Cratylus to begin with and confirmed by their decision to remove you as one of the administrators.


Indeed, it sounds like an entire comedy of errors just waiting to happen it's just too bad they choose you as their first major evidence of the potential. Bet if you took that premise to Hollywood someone could make a halfway decent comedy out of it.. Hollywood could use the new ideas anyway, maybe you should. I hear they pay really well there for new material. *chuckle*

I don't know who Keirath is, but the solution Koron responds to him/her with would be acceptable to me. A link from the repository to the project site would solve the entire issue.

BTW, Kavir referenced another post, here: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topic&t=639&p=8125#p8125

He used it to attempt to show my hypocrisy or something. I think he needs to go back and read it again, because I never concluded that the license was irrevocable. I said a reasonable argument could be made along those lines, but it's nowhere near certain. You only arrive at this type of certainty with a court case. Also, one might note, he flippantly dismisses the verified legal interpretation that Groklaw got from an attorney on the subject.

Diku is not the GPL, and is in fact not legally compatible with it. The Diku license does not become GPL-like in principle just because one German developer wishes for it to be so.

There are a lot of reasons why people dislike the Diku license. Vague wording and conflicting intentions would probably invalidate the entire thing if it were to reach a courtroom. Guess what happens if there's no license to grant you anything?

HEHE this made me laugh pretty damn hard.




I do not think there is anything that anyone can do to ""REBUILD" the community. The MB community is cannibalistic by nature, its entire purpose is to eat its own and anyone else who gets in the way of the 3 or 4 personalities who think it is their god given right to destroy others.

Muds will not improve until you get rid of those asshats who are the root cause of all this shit, when the HAS BEENS finally give up and get lives, then you may have a chance to form a community that serves a purpose worthy of note.

Take a look at the top 20 to 40 muds on TMC, you know, the ones with atleast 40+ players, and tell me, how many of the game admins of the CREAM of the mud crop participate at MC or TMC, very few of them, and the reason is simple, MB and TMC are populated with wanna be's, trolls and has beens and it is a waste of time going there for anything.

David Halley, techniaclly a great programmer, but will never complete anything of note because he wastes all his time telling everyone how great he is on MB rather than coding something for others to enjoy. He has a game that no one plays, and no one plays it because he is too busy postulating on MB to care about running it.

Cratylus, could not code his way out of a wet paper bag, obvious bugs in his code are never fixed because he does not have the ability to do so even when its pointed out to him, so insecure in his own code base that he runs 20 to 30 copies of it across a number of servers (For Testing) just to inflate the number of DS based muds in IMC and I3 to make DS and himself look more popular than he is. Watch out during Ramadam, all that dick washing and not eating really gets this poor muslim boys troll up.

Oh i could go on and on here and list off many others, but i wont, the point is, that if your serious about making a mud, MB, TMC, I3 and IMC are not the places to associate. Seeking the aproval of a bunch of trolls, yesterdays heros and wanna be's is only going to destroy and passion you have for your game. Cause lets face it, not one of them at MB can make a game, complete it and get people playing it, stay and love it, so why the fuck would anyone want to take advice from them.

One hundred percent agree.


Sweet!


It already has happened and is going over like a bad boxoffice bomb.


Me neither, but a level-headed unbiased third party is always nice to have. He makes some nice (and wise) comments. Maybe it's your adoring fan Anon *shrug*

Just read two additional pages to that thread made throughout the day and it just gets funnier and funnier. Now people are getting paranoid. You know, it just makes me wonder if the people that cause all this drama ever look back one day and say to themselves "What was I thinking?"

On a good note, looks like the repository is all cleaned up now.

I wish I'd thought of that. Just imagine how insanely popular AFKMud would be today if I'd filled the IMC and I3 servers with 50 fake copies. Oh wait, no, I'd have been banned for doing that.



Can't argue the logic there. You'll probably also find that the top 100 at TMS don't participate at MB or TMC or on either of the intermud networks.



Yes, because I took things to the next level and sent them a cease & desist notice. Perhaps this whole blow up could have been avoided by doing it via email to begin with. Then again, had they complied with my original demand, we wouldn't be here today. I think it's also beneficial to the community as a whole to bring the weakness of the Diku license into the light. I strongly suspect the hostile reaction to this is because many of those opposed to what happened here have been awakened to the reality that the entire branch is resting on a house of cards. They don't want to face that reality.

Wow. I missed a lot.

Thanks for the compliments, and yes, I'm aware I get emotionally charged easily. I have been working on it. And I have taken several strides forward, but Meh. No one's perfect.

The_Fury: David actually has a completed MUD up and running, and until recently still averaged quite a few players per day.

As to the rest of the whole situation, it's just another case of License Nazi's parading around waving their flags.

Also of note, I believe KaVir works in Germany, and is from the UK.

Fix: All instances where I referred to the Diku team and/or their university as Dutch have been corrected. They're Danish, and so is the university.

Another issue which hasn't been addressed is the fact that the Merc license has no mention of permission to distribute the derived work. Nor does the Smaug license. I'm sure nobody truly wants to go down this road of properly analyzing this whole mess which is why they're trying so hard to shut it down.

But they do, they say follow the Diku, which included the licensing about distribution. Merc and Smaug only extend upon the Diku. In essence the Merc and Smaug licenses should be read as every aspect of the Diku + every aspect of Merc + every aspect of Smaug licenses. So smaug restricts distribution in its license by default in its blanket terms that require you to follow the Diku explicitly. So do distribute Smaug you must have a license to do so, because you cant distribute the Diku code within smaug without it.

Well that being the case then everything is pinned on a clause that isn't legally reliable enough to say one way or the other if anyone ever had the right to distribute the code. Twenty years of MUD history standing on the head of a pin more or less.

It also doesn't matter. MudBytes is not a party to the license and cannot claim rights under it. Therefore normal copyright applies and they are barred from distribution.

Shh! You know none of us really wants to actually answer that one.


Fair enough, but you just know that there are plenty more possibilities in this arrangement just waiting to come to light. :D


Actually, I'm not sure I'd entirely agree with this statement. Despite the apparent desire to be a copyright lawyer and the attempt at insulting all of us over here, KaVir really has done a pretty good job at creating a very impressive codebase. I have no idea how successful he's been at maintaining a player base, but I can't exactly boast a huge one of those myself either. I don't think he's the only one either. There are plenty of others at MB & TMC and on I3/IMC for whom I'd entirely agree with your assessment though.


Amen to that, I haven't bothered even considering visiting the site and reading the whole thread, but I skimmed the RSS from it and it looks like whoever this person is they're doing a great job.


Yeah, I loved it when I saw Kiasyn chime up about his Lua infused version of SmaugFUSS... that was just amazing... *chuckle*


Sounds like good news to me, perhaps it's a sign that this silliness can come to a close soon.


You really have, especially if you're into oblivion. We haven't seen you over here in quite awhile, how've you been?


True enough, none of us are perfect and I'm glad to hear that you're aware that you've gotten better at handling things, it's important to be aware that you're making progress and often helpful to be aware that others have noticed it too.


I'll take your word for it as I've absolutely no reason not to, but I've never actually seen his mud only his posts about how successful and skilled he is.


It really does sound that way, either that or a group of very paranoid folks flaking out at the thought that someone might be enforcing a license issue even if it's regarding a codebase they themselves don't use...


Oh, it just gets richer and richer! :D


Easy enough mistake to make, it can be really confusing which of the two is which if you don't regularly deal with either country in any way.



I'd have to side with Fury on this one, the smaug/merc licenses both basically say for everything we're not specifically covering you must adhere to the diku license. Yes, that does mean the last 20 years or so of mud history in the diku tree hinge on a very questionable implied license. No, of course no one really wants to go down that road because of all the potential deathtraps along the way, not just for the one who traverses the path, but for everyone who has ever used diku or one of its derivatives that automatically gets dragged along with that person.

I have very little doubt they don't want this issue brought into the light because it's making them realize they've been handing out terrible advice the entire time they've been part of the community. The implied right to distribution has been taken for granted all these years and has never been seriously investigated. The Groklaw link referred to in one of the conversations on MudBytes makes mention of damage to the public good. It's pretty clear that the article is talking about something of substantial importance and not something as niche as a MUD. You'd be hard pressed to prove that the invalidation (or revocation) of the Diku license would cause any real and lasting harm to anyone beyond the MUD community, such as it is.

The MUD community could simply move away and use something else not built on this legal house of cards. Areas built by the staff on the MUD would be immune from damage because their original content cannot be subject to the license. Code written by the staff and added to the codebase also belongs to them, so they won't lose everything they put in. Nobody will lose the thousands of hours Kavir and Tyche cry about. A competent staff can be up and running in another base in a matter of weeks, if not days. Who knows, that might actually be a good thing as it would instantly weed out the morons who don't have a clue what they're doing.

Personally i find it easier to say screw the license and all the bullshit that goes with it and just revoke copyright. Sorry MB but your all a bunch of asshats and i no longer grant you permission to display or distribute my copy-written works. Pretty much that's the end of the story, with that there is nothing they can do.

@Samson: Well, considering that most modern MMORPGs have come from the mud world and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few are actually essentially derivatives of diku itself, even if indirectly, it might actually have a greater impact than you're attributing, but the point is otherwise valid. As for weeding out those morons, I have to admit that I would be one of those it'd take weeks to get back running since I'd have to run a series of diffs to figure out what I'd added codewise. Honestly, I'm not sure that, if that were to happen, I'd even be able to honestly distinguish even with diffs what was actually stemmed from Diku versus mods I'd made versus fixes from FUSS versus stuff stemmed from Merc/Smaug.. it'd certainly take quite a bit of effort.

@Fury: That's fine and dandy for snippets and code that you actually wrote, but it doesn't work nearly as well for entire codebases that are derived from previous codebases, unless you're only talking about distribution rights. I'm also not so sure display rights are a good idea, unless there is some reason that you would find a link to your site for distribution a problem and that you wouldn't even want folks at MB (members/visitors) to even know that your works exist.

@Conner: Yes, I imagine if any MMORPGs were dumb enough to do that it would cause some even bigger problems. One such famous incident being the "Everquest is modified Diku" incident. I'd link to the details but it seems dikumud.com is down at the moment so I don't have it handy. The outcome was a sworn statement from Sony that Everquest did not copy any code from DikuMUD. Chances are the real reason this distribution mess has never been challenged on a serious level is because there's nothing to be gained from it. If they're not going to pursue Vryce for crystal clear violations, they're certainly not coming after the rest of us. So it falls to the rest of us to protect what's ours by whatever means we have legally available. Again, I must repeat, MudBytes is not a party to the license and therefore is not able to claim rights based on that.

@The_Fury: That's what we did in a nutshell. Permission for them to distribute was revoked. They refused to comply with my initial demand. They failed to fully comply when Kayle repeated that demand. Only after I emailed the MB admins with a cease & desist did they finally realize I wasn't kidding.

Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on the specifics you want us to see in that link?

I believe the Everquest thing was what I had in mind.

I'm going to have to second Samson's sentiments, Tyche, that link covers much more material than I care to read without something specific in scope (no pun intended) to clarify what we're supposed to be seeing there.

It's a shame because it's actually shorter and much more illuminating than Samson's original blog post.

I have no doubt that it's shorter and potentially much more illuminating, but if you insist on being coy about what we're supposed to find, I suspect our interest in spending more time on it won't last.

It may be shorter, but it is probably also even drier reading and lacks a reason to want to read it presently as you've given a link without any sort of commentary. How illuminating it might be probably requires one to know what it's meant to be shedding light upon as well.

I would suggest that Scandum provide his own evidence for his right to distribute anything branching up from DikuMUD then. Or provide evidence that Russ Taylor secured permission from the Merc team to distribute Rom. Or that the Merc team provide evidence to prove they secured permission from the DikuMUD team. Can anyone see the silliness of where that line of reason ends? If private distribution agreements exist, nobody is obligated to provide evidence of them except the licensee upon being summoned to court by the licensor. MudBytes is not a recognized court body and therefore has no standing to subpoena such evidence.

Seriously people, Here Be Dragons^®. It would be better for everyone involved not to draw this kind of legal attention to the hobby otherwise the rampant and inherent piracy that props it up will get exposed.

Ouch! *wincing!*
You're dead right about this, but I'd so much prefer you not to point this all out quite so brutally either. After all, even those of us who aren't active on MB but still use a derivative of Diku are actually being effectively impacted by this MB-based tribuneral, particularly if it draws legal attention from the original Diku team via retellings. It's bad enough that the legal attention is being drawn over at MB this way, but to put it into plain english like that...

Well, it's either we have the right to control distribution of our work, or the license condones piracy. They can't have it both ways. I hate to be brutally honest about it like this, but that's the road they seem to want to travel by insisting MB is party to the license. The Diku license is an EULA. For the legally impared: End User License Agreement. MudBytes is not the end user.

I agree that MB isn't the end user thus isn't covered by the EULA included with Diku and it's derivatives, but I really don't want to see this become some sort of fiasco of the caliber to destroy the mud community legally either, despite the best attempts by Scandum... (and any others who keep insisting on dragging this through the mud until the wrong attention is garnered irreconcilably).

Let this blog posting be a lesson. Never get involved in a copyright battle like this in public. If you have something you demand be taken down and the party fails to comply, skip the public drama scene and file your DMCA notice and be done with it. This entire affair has turned into a he-said she-said mess over what was demanded and when, and right about now a certified return mail receipt would shut everyone the hell up about it.

Not directed toward most of you here. This is to the lying sacks of shit over at MudBytes who are now claiming no such demands were ever made back in October and using manipulated chat logs to prove their case.

They've resorted to trying to claim that you'd never asked in the first place now?? Geez, what's the difference at this point if they've already complied? They just feel that they have to "win" publicly in order to save face? How sad. If anything, I'd think they should be saying something akin to 'look, the matter's been resolved and everyone involved is satisfied so in the interest of peace and community well-being we're closing this discussion and locking the thread.' rather than continuing to escalate the matter in order to retain the 'hot topic' and prove they did no wrong, especially considering they know full well that, regardless of whether it's the right decision to remove your works from their site, it is your right to do so, and therefore they were wrong to not comply in full at the first request (though a slight hesitation while they verified that you really meant it and weren't just acting rashly or lashing out would have been more than excusable) instead of ever letting it get this far.

Yeah, they could have done just what you said. But this is MudBytes. They don't admit mistakes. Also, as soon as the thread was locked, Cratylus would jump on them for being forum nazis and locking a thread without cause, thus creating even more drama. It's a no-win scenario there.

Koron had the only truly useful compromise which I've already stated I'm in favor of. Have an entry on the site for the project which points a link back to the SmaugMuds.org download entry. I can't tell if anyone even noticed he proposed it or if they've considered it, but it would have put an end to the lunacy of it all.

Glad to see (on MB) that this has finally been all worked out. It's just too bad it had to happen that way.

Samson: I understand that, I just don't think it should've been this way, even for them. Cratylus was quite fond of instigating things with you and then once they were in full bloom suggesting what you could have done instead, consider this turning the tables.

I'm not sure that would have put an end to it, it hd become quite the pissing contest the last I'd looked, but at least it was quite a reasonable solution that could've resolved the real issue right then and there, but amidst their contest of wils I doubt they'd have wanted to do something reasonable all of the sudden like that. *shrug*

Hanaisse: It all got worked out on MB finally? How? What happened?

I'll let Samson explain it. All I know is what I see, there may be much more to it.

If you want the spoiler, Kayle made a very good post diffusing the situation and has agreed to use the 'link' idea from koron. I guess we'll see if that satisfies the hungry wolves.

Sounds like a good enough spoiler, hopefully that works.

Well as usual I haven't been told anything one way or the other yet. I can't say I appreciate being cast as the devil in all this either when I did nothing wrong and am being vilified over a license the site isn't even a party to. So there's nothing official decided yet.

You're being cast as the devil and vilified?? I'm telling you, the mud community (particularly when it involves a major forum site) is almost always way more ...interesting and dramatic... than any soap opera that's ever aired. *shaking his head and chuckling*

I probably shouldn't have said anything. Samson, I assumed you and Kayle had discussed the solution before he announced it, and I'm sorry if I stepped on any toes or was the bearer of any ill-will.

I'll clarify for Conner et al: The solution does not pertain to AFKMud, only the other FUSS bases. But, as stated, nothing official yet.

Seems to me this would've been a good situation for Kayle to have been in touch with Samson via IM while deciding what to post then.

So, in a nut shell, you're saying that it's still "game on!" regarding all the stuff that actually bears accreditation directly to Samson, but that Kayle caved on the rest?

It's still officially "game on" for all of it because while I will support the site linking out to SmaugMuds.org I will not approve of them distributing the package directly. Kayle and I had a rather heated discussion about this but at no time did he ever mention a solution to me over IM or email. He simply sprung it on the forum at MB as though he'd consulted me on it - which he has not yet.

His post more or less paints me as the devil in all this claiming I misrepresented the truth. Those of us tuned to political circles know that's PC speak for "you lied". I did not lie. I made the demand, Davion ignored it, I wasn't aware of that until more recently. I really don't get what the motivations are behind all of this because all it turned into is another fine example of what the MUD community has become.

It also serves to effectively erode the rights of developers if the community willfully refuses to obey and enforce distribution licensing. That's why I called it as akin to software piracy, because that's precisely what it is.

What can you expect from a bunch of vultures who have no real purpose in life, who, to make themselves feel big and strong, resort to victimizing people via the internet. Bunch of pathetic losers need to grow a set of balls and get the fuck over themselves. I should stealth my way into the next mud meet and go and kick Davions and Crats asses and anyone else who is stupid enough to jump into the fray, i was going to do it last time, but got talked out of the idea, hopefully i have free time the next time the do it.

I see Tyche posted another one of his Pulitzer Prize winning posts. Way to add nothing to the debate. At one point i used to think you were funny, now i just think you are a goose with too much ADHD going on to be able to construct a meaningful post.

You know, i should not post on days when I feel like kicking the cat.

Oops, sounds like Kayle overstepped his authority in an effort at reconciliation.

Wait, it was Kayle who cast you as the devil and vilified you??
Yes, well, I can't argue about it being "another fine example of what the MUD community has become" because of two things: a) I haven't followed the discussion first hand (intentionally) & b) I'm pretty unhappy with the MUD community in general too.

I can't argue that point either, I just hate to see someone brandishing such terms in respect to the whole community in general like that because it paints all of us, myself included, in a rather bad light that I would not want to have to try to defend against, especially considering in this case we've touched on some issues that may just not be defensible that certainly make quite a large segment of the community at large guilty of an actual crime that most of us do everything we can to prevent others from engaging in.

Oops, RL interfered while I was writing that last post and Fury got one in before I hit the post button...

@Fury:
Um, careful, in this country they can lock you away for fighting, especially if you've got witnesses who say you started it and losers who decide to press charges.

No, you probably shouldn't post when you're feeling that way.

"another fine example of what the MUD community has become"

MB is not the THE mud community, it is A mud community, one that is very dysfunctional and unwelcoming to anyone who does not/will not, follow the party line. Take a quick look over the happenings of the last 12 months and you will see exactly what i mean.

Someone new comes along, who has spirit and passion for making a game, they might be a little weird, might not spell perfectly or have great grammar, they make some posts about how excited they are about their ideas, and within no time, they are barraged with negativity from all corners until they give up on their dreams like everyone else has at MB.

I have said this before, but it still remains true, any advice you get from anyone at MB is going to be bad advice, you are not going to get cooking advice from a bricklayer, why the hell would you take advice on making and running a mud from people who do neither of these things.

The sad thing is, MB and TMC attract the noobs, and then they get broken by the like of Crat and Drizzt and then leave the hobby forever. In the early days of my mudding hobby i never had anything to do with mud forums etc, and the day i started having something to do with them was the biggest mistake i have ever made, MB and TMC are not worth the time and effort, they are filled with people who could not care a rats ass about MUDs and most are just broken pathetic people who are out to shit on as many noobs as they can find.

My initial mud had 15+ people online during peak times and rather than focus on that, i focused on making a name for myself on forums and playing THE GAME with people who did not really deserve my time and attention. The idea of MB, TMC, IMC and I3 are all good, but the reality is, they fill up with broken people who have no passion for MUDs, do not run muds and really don't want anything to do with muds and the end result of such is obvious to anyone outside looking at it.

Thats the reason why you have endless drama on MB, none of them have any purpose, so they have to parade and proselytize their own misguided point of view to give themselves a reason to be there. Boored people are only ever going to cause trouble, get rid of all the EX mudders from MB and the whole place will be a much better place.

You also don't seek legal advice from MUD administrators.

Wow, Fury.. I'm not sure I entirely agree with your post, but I am quite impressed with how well it's written. On the other hand, I don't disagree with most of your post either. The main thing I disagree with is your initial statement, actually, because I do believe that MB, TMC, TMS, IMC, I3, etc may not be the whole MUD community but they do seem to be an accurate reflection of the majority of it. Of course that's really sad for the community as a whole, but at least neither of us is saying that all of the people within the MUD community are like that, so there's still cause for hope.

Samson, the sad fact is that, while that should be entirely basic common sense, far too many members of the community do exactly that regularly, particularly with regard to copyright law issues.

The main reason i think that way Conner is because the vast majority of successful muds do not have anyone that frequents those places, so, to my way of thinking, there has to be a reason why the BEST of what muds have to offer are being intentionally absent from this community that people speak of and that is because MB, TMC, IMC and I3 are not representative of the greater mud community and the only ones who seem to prosper in those places are those who are broken and disillusioned with mudding as a whole.

I hardly consider the opinions of DH, Crat and Co, to be representative of the greater mud community, this is not to say that they do not have intelligent things to say, because often they do, but rather, that that their interests are not purely about the betterment of muds as a whole.

The absence of the staff of the best muds, to me, speaks volumes, why do you not see those who run the best games? One possible answer is Image. Another might be about self esteem, no one likes to be torn down, and on MB, TMC, IMC and I3 you are much more likely to be torn down, than built up about your ideas.

Mmmm Fresh raspberry and 80% cocoa while chocolate muffins, just cooked a still hot from the oven, total decadence in a cake. LOL An interesting side effect of having a bad day is that i cook, making spinach and pumpkin gnocchi next with a basil, chili and garlic tomato sauce, garlic and herb bread, and a nice rocket and baby spinach salad with crispy lardon's black olives, that's dinner and desert covered for tonight Oh and lardons, dont know if you use that term in the USA is pork belly, and you cook it to a crisp like bacon.

I suppose you have a valid enough point, but it seems like these others would still need some sort of collaborative resource to really be successful, or do you suppose they just visit the same sites as lurkers?

Considering I don't eat pork at all, your meal plan other than the muffins doesn't sound very appealing to me, but each to his own, eh?

I'm sure I sound like a broken record about all this but I think your top tier MUD admins/owners/etc hang out over at TMS. If any games can claim to be on top of the hobby, it's those. So if you're looking to get advice or just hang out with people who know their stuff, that's where you'd want to do it. Topics like this rarely come up there and even when they do, they get handled in a calm and civil manner and nobody goes off half-cocked calling each other liars.

I've always more or less avoided the forums at TMS in the past because they seemed as active as the ones at either MB or TMC and those two keep me more than busy enough on their own given all the other stuff I was involved in, but maybe now that I've mostly given up on those two I'll have the time again to go look into the forums there then.

It's definitely quite a difference. The atmosphere is much friendlier there than at TMC or MB. You still have some of the usual suspects hanging out there, but since the group isn't complete it doesn't tend to lead to blow-ups while they show off their e-peens to each other.

That does sound enticing.. perhaps even inviting.

You were told in that heated discussion we had over it that I was going with the link solution.

They're not distributing the package directly.

After you provided me with an identical AIM log as the one Davion provided me, I don't know how you could claim they used butchered logs. It was your providing that identical log that made me realize that you had in fact, never asked for the removal of the FUSS project code from the MudBytes Repository to begin with. You asked for things you had authored, and you specifically mentioned AFKMud. Since neither of us have ever listed the FUSS bases as our own work, instead choosing to list them as Various, or Community. They don't fall under your request. Because we're not the sole authors. A great many people have invested time, effort, and code into getting the FUSS bases where they are. Revoking MUDBytes right to distribute because of a personal issue with them, after realizing that it WAS simply a personal issue and no violation of any form on their part, left a bad taste in my mouth; and a taint on the project. I could not in good faith let that taint hang over the project. I am not the sole author of the FUSS bases. I am not the sole maintainer. I'm not the sole contributor. Therefore, my personal feelings don't matter. What matters is that the work a great many people put into that base is widely available, and that their right to see their work put to use isn't trampled on because you or I disagree with the actions of someone else.

No one here, save probably Hana, can claim to have looked at this with as much scrutiny as I have. I discussed this for several hours with Davion, and then with Samson, and both provided me with identical accounts of the conversation. I compared these two conversations provided WORD BY WORD. They are identical. No changes. No butchers. No Alterations. Identical. My request for MudBytes to cease distribution of the FUSS Bases was done under a false pretense. Even by your own admission, you didn't phrase your request the way you should have. And thus you can claim no ill will towards someone else for your own mistake.

As for the licensing part of the discussion here, I spoke to a friend who works with this sort of thing all the time (read: lawyer). He reviewed all three licenses, and his opinion was that the licenses do in fact grant the right to distribute, but that they do it in an ambiguous way. The fact that distribution is fine is evident by two statements in the original Diku License:


and:


You'll probably argue that it doesn't specify as to what counts as giving away or what have you. But it doesn't matter. The license grants the right to give away any part of DikuMUD. It doesn't matter if you give away one file, or all of it. The fact remains that there is a clear intent to allow distribution. Ambiguous as it may be, the intent is there.

This is really strictly between you two. Whatever faults you may have (perceived or real), I will say that you usually do stand behind your friends better than the picture Samson painted last week. This is why I was rather surprised that he was saying not only that he was being vilified on MB but that it was by you.


As one of those "great many people" I couldn't care less about the bad taste it may have left in your mouth and I don't really care who believes that the project has such a taint (though I would rather it not bear one in the first place, but a dispute between Samson and Davion/Kiasyn doesn't qualify as a taint to me), but otherwise I do agree with what you're saying here. I have enough respect for Samson that I am quite willing to support his decision to have the entire FUSS project removed from MB if he feels that it should be since he was the project lead from its inception (on both FUSS and MB) as far as I know (and I've been involved with FUSS almost since its inception) but I had been saying since the beginning of this incident that I didn't feel like it seemed the right course because I hadn't seen the MB admins actually do anything negative toward the repository they're running and because we (Samson and many others, including myself) very vocally established MB from the onset as a repository to serve the entire community without gaps except for that software being distributed illegally. (License violations and such) and this isn't really the case here.


Has anyone here even implied such a claim to date? Including Hanaisse? Personally, I'd specifically posted repeatedly that while I was reading bits of it, almost exclusively via RSS feed, I was specifically trying to not actually get involved for my own reasons.


Gee, that's what I'd been saying all along too. I don't think the wording is very clear and it certainly doesn't specifically say anywhere "You may distribute", but it's quite obviously implied. I just don't know (or care to know) licensing law well enough to know for certain if, unlike so many laws, it follows plain common sense. Glad to see that someone's finally gotten a lawyer to respond about it though, that should settle the issue finally short of someone on the Diku Team actually bringing this license to a court somewhere. And, it also exonerates all of us who use Diku derivatives of the wording I objected to Samson using earlier as well, at least until such time as a member of the Diku Team tries to come forward claiming otherwise in a courtroom. Aside from the fact that I seriously doubt that a member of the original Diku Team would bring this into a court given the past examples we've had, I also think we'd be able to argue that, collectively, we've been under the completely reasonable impression from the wording of the license that distribution had been consented to, at least by implication, without being given any reason to question that impression for decades even with the scrutiny that the entire community could give the license over the years without being told otherwise by any of the original Diku Team even when they were still involved and well aware that their code was being distributed both as original works and as various derivative works, and therefore if that wasn't implication was incorrectly being interpretted we're all sorry and will happily cease all distribution but can not be faulted for having done it in the past.

Well unlike some people involved in this debate who claim to have consulted phantom attorneys on the matter, I'll just put this here:



I attached a copy of the Diku license and send it to the legal advice tea at softwarefreemdom.org. Here's the response I got back from one Daniel B. Ravicher:


Note his opinion that this isn't an open source license, and that he specifically states that #1 through #4 would only apply if it was. So you people can take the legal bullshit and shove it until you're prepared to put up actual names of people willing to go on public record as this man was gracious enough to do even though I didn't pay him a dime.

This is exactly the can of worms that shouldn't be getting opened with this stuff because there's no guarantee the judge you get in court won't rule the same way this lawyer analyzed the situation.

At this point I don't give a fuck what spin you want to put on what you said in public Kayle, it's right there for all to see. You told them all the entire incident was my fault and stopped just short of implying I did it all on purpose or something and that I'm an asshole for it. Well I'm tired of it. You all wanted me to be an asshole. So be it. I'm an asshole. Happy now? Good.

Well put.

At this point I don't give a shit about this issue any more. For all our sakes GET OVER IT. Please.

I don't care who said what to whom, who has logs and who doesn't, how everyone interprets what happened is a matter of personal opinion. How it makes each party look is a matter of personal opinion. Right now you both look like a couple of women holding a grudge, and it's just sad (<--- personal opinion). That's what this has boiled down to. Enough already.

It doesn't even matter anyway. MB hasn't added the link (as far as I can see) so who cares???????

So, they made all that fuss about whether or not FUSS could be distributed from MB and then didn't even bother to add the link anyway once it was settled that they could distribute it that way? There's some irony to be found in that...

Welcome to the world of Muds, where who has a log is the winner. Smokey the Bear would POWN on mudbytes with all his logs.

*groan* That's the best play on words you could come up with for that?
But okay, we can run with your choice of word play though... Smokey's problem would be that most of his logs are illegible due to fire damage, and the folks at MB seem perfectly happy to fabricate logs as needed to retaliate for any logs he did have that were still legible. Now, if the folks at MB wanted to host a bonfire using their logs, it'd probably not only be visible from space, but even from Venus.

Unfortunately they do care and as Fury so humorously put, they care to the point of keeping those logs for years at a time just waiting to spring them on people when they least expect it. If Kayle thinks my assertion of distribution rights left a bad taste in his mouth, imagine how people who archive this shit for years leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouths when they trot it out 10 years from now after nobody can verify its integrity?

I'm sorry to say, it happens all too often and it's the real poison that's destroying what little community is left. The people at MudBytes are far too interested in eating their own to care what impact it has on the greater community. Not that they're going to take advice from me on the subject, but hey.

I'm one of those folks who keeps logs of IM chats and email and such for years too, but I can honestly say that I've never dragged a log of any sort out days, let alone years, later just spring it on anyone. I've kept them mostly out of habit from when I ran my BBS, but they have served me from time to time when I couldn't remember a programming detail, or an important fact from a conversation, or, less frequently, when someone tried to claim that I'd said something in a way that meant something entirely different from what I'd actually said.

I don't think the poison is in keeping logs, but in how and why they're being used.

The only reason I posted that log was to show that this initial request for SmaugFUSS to be removed never happened. This was confirmed by Samson providing the exact same log!

I have no problem with conforming to the right to distribute, nor do I think that MudBytes is hording over code. We provide a free place for people to promote and distribute their code. If they want it removed, it doesn't hurt us, it hurts them by lowering their exposure. People don't visit MudBytes because we distribute SmaugFUSS . They come because MudBytes is the number one place on the internet to discuss development of MUDs. No where else (TMS, TMC, MudLab, Slayn, etc) will you find the same amount of activity, and quality programmers. We have professional developers, maintainers of major packages (eg. Stackless Python) and tons of other extremely astute individuals. You can cut them down at the knees as much as you want with statements like "all the quality people go to TMS" but those of us who visit MudBytes know the caliber of their contributions.

Unforutnately, SmaugFUSS isn't up on MudBytes right now because the maintainers request I link to their download package instead of hosting my own. This requires a rather large change in the code to support submitted files with links instead of files themselves. This means, it's on the todo list . I also have to come up with a warning when linking directly to another download, but that's rather trivial . I'm not sure where all this came from anyways. One week I have Kayle as my Smaug moderator updating our FUSS releases, the next week their rippin everything down! The mixed signals I'm getting is mind boggling.

Ya know Samson, you told me once before that MudBytes was bigger then any one person, or the admins. And you're right. The same goes for SmaugFUSS. You're hording over peoples work as your own sword to swing at "injustices".

Anyways, the likelyhood of SmaugFUSS coming back soon is pretty small considering real life business which is extremely unfortunate for the FUSS community.

This from the king of mixed signals himself. "Cratylus is the problem, but you're fired." I think that says it all.

Oddly enough, I was rather surprised tonight when I finally got back to checking my RSS feeds after being gone for three days (had to help my wife's uncle get his house into sellable condition) and seeing that it appears as though the thread that started this over on MB is back... with Kayle and Davion and Tyche in the thick of it.. of course, I suppose I could've been mislead by the brevity of what's shown in RSS.

Nah, you didn't miss anything. It had been quiet for awhile before Davion showed up to stoke things here again. Although it seems Tyche couldn't help himself and stoked shit on MB too.

Kavir seems hung up on the history of having been revoked and isn't bothering to mention that the right to do so exists regardless of whether there's history or not so that puts everyone into "grey market" status. That's a bit like saying "don't worry, you can profit, there's no history of anyone being sued". That's dangerous advice to give anyone with regard to licensing and copyright.

Ah, I wasn't sure how it got restarted since I was only seeing the last couple of posts or so there in my feed (MB does have enuogh activity that the current feed settings leave much to be desired).

Interesting choice of comparisons considering that I've personally seen that specific advice regarding Diku derivatives offered before.

Blah blah blah blah....

A little late to the party.

Why not man up and come say something then, bitch!

Right. And that's what it's all about. Why do you have to punish something like SmaugFUSS, because I'm an asshole?

I'd much rather you come at me personally, then pull something like this. It hurts the community. It hurts your community.

No. It's about my having demanded a takedown and you having refused to comply. I shouldn't have had to whine about it to Kayle or had to threaten to file a DMCA notice against your site to have it removed. Yet that's exactly what ended up happening, and thankfully Kiasyn has enough brains to realize I wasn't kidding about it.

The only reason it hurts the community is because the community is now advocating a position inconsistent with copyright law. Basically that we had no right to order the takedown because there's no history of past takedowns. The law doesn't care. The law says we had that right all along and could choose to exercise it at any time. This silly notion that it's only a problem because it's only just now been done isn't something the courts would go along with. Either we have the right to control distribution of the package or we don't. Period.

Your having refused to comply is what brought us to the legal argument I presented here, and with the correspondence I had with the softwarefreemdom.org people. Their advice is consistent with my understanding of the law on this issue and their analysis that the Diku license is not an open source license was rather enlightening.

If you want to know what's really hurting the community, look to your own participants. Tyche and Kavir, actively trying to sabotage a prominent codebase based on their own terribly flawed grasp of the law. You say they have the right to say it. I don't disagree, they do have that right. But they're the ones causing real harm, not me.

Oh, and it appears as though Cratylus has something to say to The_Fury. Well, since he can read the text here, he's not banned and is welcome to come refute it. Though I can guarantee you that most of us don't give a crap about whatever that's all about.

...Actually. No. That's not what happened. You requested I removed all your authored code. I did. gone, bam, in an instant. I was never told to remove FUSS untill Kayle demanded. The original answer was 'No' because he wasn't the credited author, nor was he mentioend anywhere in the copyrights. Finally, after this, you asked we remove it, and we did. So *shrug* We never said you couldn't have your code removed. We've always complied with peoples request to remove code.

It is what happened, and you know it's what happened. You can tell yourself whatever lies you want to tell yourself to make yourself feel better but it changes nothing. You were given a demand, did not comply, and had to have someone else come repeat it.

Your methods of dealing with legitimate demands to remove code leave much to be desires too. Blocking all future upload ability for that person for exercising their legal rights? How noble of you.

Let it go Sam. All those fucks know how to do is tear people down. They won't ever get it.

Wow, so much drama.. oh yeah, we're discussing something to do with the mud community. :sigh:

Personally, while I don't advocate the rise in blood pressure that it would've undoubtedly caused, I'm not sure why this particular conversation between Samson and Davion wasn't handled by IM or email, it doesn't much look like a public discussion nearly so much as a two way tit-for-tat thing.

Alas, banned or not, Cratylus is right about one thing, no one here really is likely to give a damn about what he's got to say at this point enough for his appearance to accomplish much beyond possible personal venting about whatever it might be he feels The_Fury is slandering him with regard to. While not all of us completely share The_Fury's sentiments toward Cratylus, certainly not with his gusto anyway, most of us don't have a much higher regard for him than The_Fury does either.

I can only giggle about all this. Since when does cratylus give two hoots about anything that i have to say about him or anything else for that matter. In his view i am a nut job not worthy of his time and attention, so much so that he has me ear muffed on his dev mud and on I3.

There is only one explanation that in my view would warrant crat responding to my claims, what i have to day is true and he does not want his cred tarnished, or the the wheel of troll has just turned again and crat is just looking to cook up a storm to fulfill whatever is lacking in his life. Its not like anyone outside of this blog is going to take what i have to say seriously, and often the people here do not take what i have to say all that serious either. About the only thing we all share, as Samson and Conner have both pointed out is a distaste of crat, each of us for different reasons.

I think it totally hilarious that people still find me such an appealing topic for conversation at MB or IMC or wherever that quote came from, especially considering that i am an irregular poster here as it is. I think its about time they all grew up, moved on and let this shit die, its not like anyone of us is going running to MB and IMC to play in this stupid and silly game.

Actually, I find it interesting that Cratylus even might care about something you've said here because it tells me that, despite his claims to the contrary, he's still concerned about at least some of us enough to be regularly reading what's being said here so he can follow along as a lurker.

He must already know by now that he has no real credibility here and his own circle of flammable and highly regenerative bridge dwelling brethren would either automatically disregard anything negative against him or wouldn't be here to begin with, so if those are the only choices then I'll have to cast my vote for your latter choice.
I can't account for what others may feel about what you've got to say most of the time, but here you've had a bit of a colorful past with some of us and as a result you're usually taken fairly seriously but with a grain of salt, as best I can tell.
I wouldn't say that's the only thing we share, we've also, many of us, administrated (or been staff on) muds previously/currently and experienced MB and... the list could actually go a bit further still. Commonalities are much easier to find than you're giving credit for.

Oh you're not that irregular a poster here.. though I'm not sure I want to go quite so far as to call you normal either though.
As for running to MB or IMC.. Please. I can't remember, off-hand, the last time I posted at MB (I'd have to guess it was back around June/July of last year, but it may have actually been longer than that) and the only things I've posted to IMC in quite awhile (at least the last 6 months) have been questions to prompt someone to do something about it when inews' bot goes down because I do still read inews. Actually, I have most of the channels on still, I even have ichat still being listened to on my dev port with several people and a few muds ignored. Basically I don't follow ichat, ifree, or games and I honestly tend to not notice most of the stuff that comes across imudnews anymore but I do watch what's said on inews and icode and pchat pretty closely most of the time.

People use pchat? That channel had always been dead as a doornail. Ifree only went in because the rude and crude people who came from I3 wanted a place to be their usual asshole selves. Ichat took a real nosedive in quality around the same time they all showed up, so do the math on why it's no longer useful. I guess inews is still worth something but it's functions could be dropped into a PHP script on a webpage somewhere easily enough. Or one could use the same Google script as the one on the QSFP site to display a ticker.

It's also interesting to note that they noticed I mentioned TMS is where the quality developers went and they jumped on that almost as a pack. Even Kavir basically insulted them because of their commercial ventures. Should tell you something. Jealousy of success runs high at MB. If anything is true, MB is where all the code communists went.

Very rarely, but I carry it in case one of my players ever wants to use it so I watch what comes across it fairly closely. Ifree was suggested largely because I objected to the language and content of so much that was taking over ichat, so I've figured that, since it's inception, if that channel was created for the material I don't want to see, I certainly don't want to see that channel. I agree about ichat. The thing with inews is that I don't know how to run a script like that within my mud so I need inews to serve the purpose, but I'd actually like to throw that script into my two QSFP sites (my mud forums could cycle through the code changes like the one at QSFPortal.com does, but for the family site I'd just assume it pull real world news).

Yes, it is interesting. Kind of like what I was saying to Fury about Crat, despite all the ranting to the contrary, someone's obviously still paying close attention to what's said here.

Not that i have read anything thats been going on at MB, but, what is with Kavir on this, it would seem to be totally out of character for him to say, well, stupid things.




I just like how my opinions matter so much to a crowd of people who i have had nothing to do with for months, i feel all drunk with power because of it. I would like my legacy to be my codebase, not my name being used as a swear word at other people

Heh. Well, if it's any consolation, I've joined you in infamy. This site has been dubbed "iguanarage". My general philosophy is, if people are calling you crazy and trying to degrade you any way they can, you must be right about something. It works that way with American politics at least. The more your opposition calls you a nut, the more right you can be assured you are on the issue.

Kavir's reaction to all this really does surprise me though. I thought he had more honor and integrity than that, but perhaps not. He does after all have a huge stake in whether the license is legal or not. I'd much rather he came here to discuss his concerns though than to spew bogus junk about it on MB to anyone who will listen.

I can just picture people in the mud community years from now using the thefury social on muds or saying things like "Why you The_Fury!"... I don't know about drunk with power over any of it, I'd think somewhat disgusted would be more my thoughts, but.. it does say odd things about people who'd insist upon continuing attacks against someone months/years after the person had left the scene. It'd be a bit like us ranting about Kyndig at this point on a regular basis instead of how he occasionally gets brought up in retrospect. :sigh:


Politically that's probably true enough, socially too to a lesser extent generally, in this case it's probably damn near dead on. What does "iguanarage" mean? Oh wait, I get it, they mean to be calling the place "iguana-rage" and just get things like grammar well enough to make it clear, eh?

I've had mixed feelings about KaVir over the years, but I do agree that I'd expected more ...decorum.. from him than what you're saying he's doing, but given the way things have been on MB and IMC lately, I can't say I have any reason to question your telling of it.

Blix has seen things for what they are. So there's hope that folks over at MB are starting to realize the game they're playing with the people who frequent it.



Davion didn't quite get it though:

Now, on this whole Linode thing, Davion knows why I contacted them, and he knows why I thought the issue was coming from there. He's obviously chosen to use it as an example of how vindictive I've become or something. The real story was pretty simple. Webmin was firing emails my direction, I wanted them to stop since I'd been fired. So when Davion and Kiasyn both refused to even respond to my attempts to get it to stop, I went to the provider. Linode themselves finally told me it wasn't coming from them. When I checked the headers, figuring they were wrong, I realized it was coming from the previous provider and forwarded the complaint to them instead.

I think I mentioned once before too, if Linode is sending my emails to /dev/null, and I one day need to file a DMCA takedown notice, they're opening themselves up to legal liability under the Safe Harbor provisions by ignoring such a notice. Somehow I doubt they've done what Davion said and he's just smearing more unfounded crap around in a community of like-minded individuals who won't question him about it because they all have decided to hate me.

To his credit, David has been trying to get people to just drop it and move on, but clearly they don't want to and are still very much interested in slinging shit about me with each other. This sort of thing is eventually why the entire community will collapse and break up into small niches, assuming it hasn't done so already.

Oh, and:


I guess Kayle has forgotten where to find me, or how to use the PM system on SmaugMuds.org. If he's got something he needs to say, he knows where to say it. I really don't see why there's any need in piling on the way he's been doing lately. There's nothing to stand up to. I haven't done anything wrong, and I'm not about to admit I have just to satisfy some twisted sense of justice everyone is crowing about. If he's trying to make a subtle suggestion that I should resign, I'm afraid that's not going to happen. If he's worried I'm going to fire him, there's no reason to. We had a disagreement, I was under the impression it was settled.

I'd seen the beginning of Blix's post in my RSS feed earlier. My initial reaction was that the crowd at MB has managed to ruin the fun for yet another mud admin newbie. Seeing the rest of his post, I have to wonder if (s)he hadn't also had the misfortune of seeing IMC & TMC and thinking that those three were the entire community. But you're right, as far as this issue goes, he does seem to have the right of it.

I suspect that you've nailed Davion's position on the head there, he's spreading fuel on the fires for personal amusement in the name of self-defense rather than sharing facts of any sort. I certainly would hope that Linode isn't foolish enough to be following such ridiculous advice as to ignore the potential for a lawsuit that way.

I'm duly impressed that David's being entirely reasonable and not contributing in support of Cratylus' favorite pastime of "let's find fault with Samson" for a change.

Unfortunately, I am quite willing to accept that the community has already long since fallen to niche crowds, it's just not the ones you might expect. Typically, if it were going to happen, you'd think the community would divide along natural divisions like Moo vs. Mud then further by code trees, but in this case I think it's split more by forum crowds then programming languages & programming theories then, finally, by the more natural divisions. But I think that started to reach the point of actually showing well over a year ago.

orly David? Cratyfuck does that all the time.

wait wtf? they deleted ur account Sam! no reason, they just did it and now the forum is all fucked up

LOL i dont know what David has been smoking, but i want some. What a total load of fooee. The very mention of names like Vryce, Locke or The_Fury, or the mention of the dikhu license and who has inadvertantly broken it at some time will bring out the troll in just about everyone at MB and bring out all the old posts, emails and arguments that none of you can ever let die.

MB community does not just hold up their eternal war horses as trophies, it keeps on flogging them, well after death.

Heh. So they actually did delete my account. That's pretty funny because while it was something I asked for in the heat of the moment back in October, the timing of doing it today or yesterday or whenever it was seems suspicious to me. I guess that makes me officially on the blacklist in their little cesspool of a community

Oh, and some of them will also go beyond simply archiving things for use years later. Some, like Cratylus, will alter them before presenting them to the public.

Cratylus has his own version of history, one in which he is pumpkin pie and all that is nice. Must me hard to be humble when you are correct about everything, everyone else is wrong or at fault. No wonder some call Crat the white Mohammad.

See, for a change I was going to try to restrain myself enough to not bother commenting on our Anonymous friend's posts but Fury went and did it already so now there's no harm in my commenting too, I expect.

I agree, Fury, it's really ludicrous for David to say that given how long he's been on MB to watch just how quick folks are to drag up their dead horses for another round of flogging when those topics get broached yet again. I have to assume, given how common it is for folks at MB to also traffic TMC, that David's also been around long enough by now to see that at TMC they're actually even worse (if that's possible) about bringing back the dead threads when it comes to topics like that.

Oh heaven forbid! Not you, Samson, they couldn't blacklist you at MB, could they? </sarcasm>

Sadly, we can't really prove that he does that, as demonstrated with the whole post editing claim, we know it's the indisputably most likely scenario, but none of us are apparently actually able to prove that Cratylus alters that which he brings up when it's time for the next round of flog the dead horse....

You slipped a post in while I was posting, it seems.. you sly ...


Actually, those calling him that are part of that pretty little world that only he actually lives in, as far as I know. But, otherwise, yeah.. Wasn't there a song that had a similar line... "Lord it's hard to humble, when you're perfect in every way..." If Cratylus was considerably older, you'd have though this was written just for him...

Just how "considerably older" is he supposed to be?

Also, The_Fury, though it isn't exactly important, he can't really be a "white Mohammad" because he's not white. He could be a "brown Mohammad" though. It doesn't have anything to do with his character in any case, which he's very clearly demonstrated is flawed beyond repair.

I don't know how many people remember it or not, but when TMC had that social network online he made a posting to his blog section there where he had written a sort of song-like thing bragging about how TMS had banned him and how he'd get himself banned from MB too. He probably wishes he'd never posted that, because everyone saw it, and it was during the whole image fabrication incident.

Well, the song was released back in 1980 and I didn't think Cratylus was that much older than us - I was only 9 years old most of 1980 so I can't quite imagine Mac Davis (having been born in 1942 and thus 38 years old in 1980) having written a song about some 8-10 year old that he didn't likely know at the time. I know, it's those pesky details that get so very much in the way of real life every now and then..

I sure remember it, Samson. I don't imagine that he regrets posting it though, it got him exactly the attention that he craves so constantly at the time, much like the image fabrication incident as a matter of fact.

FWIW, some guy identifying himself as Deimos says they deleted my account the other day in response to the flow of traffic coming here, to this very topic, and folks apparently making a lot of fuss about the license or something.

Looking at my Analytics data, I can see a pretty direct correlation starting from Feb 22 up until Monday where there was elevated referral traffic coming from MB. That dropped suddenly after that and has stayed down until the huge incoming spike that followed the Sandbox 2.0 release. Looks like they were engaged in their usual suppression of the truth is all.

Wow, that's pretty amazing that deleting your account over there would've caused a significant drop in the traffic related to here. Were folks, do you suppose, following the link in your profile/signature to get here?

LOL! yep, that's why they deleted him. Davion even admitted it! made em look bad to see thr truth here!

Cratyfuck sez Sam is mentally ill too, what a hoot. they're all in their own little fantasy land at moodbites. Cratyfuck is so delusional he can't even see that hez the crazy one.

You know, the sad part is that psychological "normal" is defined by the crazies that make up the majority of society...

Honestly, I wasn't surprised to hear that was why they deleted his account but that deleting his account would directly impact the traffic significantly between there and here.

Analytics does show a pretty significant number of referals from from MB, so yes, I have to assume people were clicking on my homepage link on a regular basis. Obviously that's dropped quite a bit since they lanced my account from the system, but it hasn't dried up entirely.

@Anon: Yeah, for Cratylus to call anyone mentally ill is laughable. I think it's really just a matter of they didn't like what I had to say here, so they feel the need to make snide comments about me rather than addressing the substance of the argument.

I would've thought there were other references to your blog over there (perhaps plenty of them by now, in fact) and that anyone who'd been at least once could find their way back without needing links in your profile there. Especially with them now making fun of the name of your site in the main thread that was related to this, how hard could it be to locate the site??

There's plenty of references. So why they'd axe my account in an effort to block links to it is beyond me. Honestly I wasn't expecting they'd actually ever delete it since doing so severely disrupts the continuity of the forum. There are now big holes in the conversations attributed to "guest". It's one thing to drop someone like Locke that way, but quite another when I was the second highest post count on the site, even after I stopped participating in October 2009.

If a disgruntled member had come to me with a request/demand/rant/whatever to delete their account from the forum, I would have simply denied it while at the same time blocking access to it. They had already blocked access after the supposed hacker thing. So that should have ended it. I think we all know though that the administration there is entirely clueless about how to run a site effectively.

You'd think, if anything, they'd have just edited your account to not include links to this site, or, even more extreme, possibly blocked outgoing referrals from following links to here. Though, honestly, I'd question how it really helps them to stop traffic to this site from their own anyway, if anything it just encourages people to skip MB on their way here.

I could see deleting an account upon request/demand and being stuck with the guest atribute for all their previous posts, but you'd better believe that the higher their post count the harder I'd try to dissuade them from their decision before acting upon it.

lawl, if only Cratyfuck knew just how stupid it makes them!

@Conner: Nope. Turns out he simply did it to be spiteful for whatever reason. Can't really be undone in any case now though, member deletion is a one-way street unless they restore a backup, and I don't really care enough either way.

Yet another reason to try extra hard to dissuade someone from that choice before acting upon it then. You couldn't even "fix it" in the database directly? I would've thought you could still at least partially undo it by editing the database in phpmyadmin as long as you know what userid they'd previously had, though I suppose at least some info would likely be lost forever short of an actual backup restoration like the person's password and anything else you no longer knew to be able to restore, but you should still be able to make all the posts by that userid go back to saying they were by that person.. unless you'd also have to go fix the id on each of their previous posts.. that'd be a royal pain in the ass, still not an impossible task, but damn close.

I'm not even talking about at MB specifically now, who cares what they decide to do regarding having deleted your account at this point, I'm just talking hypothetically for any QSFP install.

I don't think the issue of deleting a user account causing disruption of the flow is limited to just QSFP. I'll wager any forum application that deletes a user is going to do something similar to what QSFP does, which is:

* Sets all posts by that user to Guest.
* Sets all topics by that user to Guest.
* Sets all files by that user to Guest.
* Expunges all topic and forum subscriptions once held by that user.
* Expunges all poll votes made by that user.
* Expunges all file ratings made by that user.
* Expunges all PMs held by that user (some of which I was not able to retrieve because they blocked me)
* Expunges all "you read this" markers for that user.
* Deletes all file uploads or updates from that user which have not been approved yet.

So no, as far as QSFP is concerned, it's a done deal. All of that would have to be manually restored. They should consider themselves lucky that the code didn't also include deleting all files ever submitted by a particular user, because a sizable portion of the repository would have vanished in a heartbeat because of Davion's childish act. Mainly because I almost put that feature in at one point.

The reason all that happens is because stuff needs to belong to someone, anyone, valid. Guest was simply how QSF and Mercuryboard both handled it and I didn't change much about that with QSFP either. If you think seeing holes with guest posts is disruptive, imagine the disruption of losing 30% of your posts entirely because the forum will no longer display them at all since the user_id is invalid.

Looking in phpBB3, there are two modes for removal of a user. "Retain" and "Remove". Retain does what QSFP does, assigning everything important to the Anonymous user account. Remove wipes it out entirely.

While I could laugh at the notion of what would've happened to the content they're offering over there if you'd set QSFP to also remove all the files and posts ever submitted by the person being deleted, but I'm also quite glad that you didn't do that in case I ever have a situation arise of needing to delete someone.

I imagine that you're right that all forum software has to take an approach similar to that, or a variation based on that one anyway, because as you say, the database and forum software have to be able to assign everything to someone. I suppose that Guest really is the logical choice because the only real alternatives would be to assign it to the admin user account instead or to have a "system" account other than guest which exists solely for that purpose.

I do think it's neat that phpBB3 offers the choice to the admin of which of the two methods to use when removing a member though, and I thought QSFP had the option of automatically deleting all posts by a user in the admin CP too.

Then he must think everyone is indignant.

You had a doubt that he might think someone wasn't?

Funny thing about Crat is he treats you in a less hostile manner once he's driven you off the forums.

You think so? I hadn't noticed, but I also hadn't actually had any interaction with him since I left the forums and IMC either.

NiM5

[Link removed - user banned]

NiM5 is an advanced multi-user gaming server.

This server was written by Herb Gilliland; the project began in 1992. NiM5 was the first to release an open-source multi-user gaming software compatible with Merc/Diku mud that included such advanced features as OLC. OLC, or on-line creation, was originally known as "online building" and was part of the undistributed "Hidden Worlds Merc MUD" until mid-1993, when Chris Woodward and Herb Gilliland wrote and released a new version called OLC that performed the same function as an add-on snippet for Merc 2.2; NiMUD 5 is the successor project to The Isles, which spun off the popular "The Isles OLC" software that became the basis for Ivan's OLC, EnvyOLC, ROMolc and ILAB OLC (the first port of the software to Merc 2.2). Parts of this software are used in over 400 active online games.

NiM5 contains 12800+ hours of work and you are benefiting, please keep our credits in your respective documentation.

Various distributions of NiMUD have been used to create derivative projects. Those projects are: Void of Reality, FateMUD, Lyonesse 1.0 (in Italian), Everwar (eWar 2.0), EmlenMUD and Midpoint Void (1,2,3); the most successful NiMUD-derived game was Rites of Passage MUD, which had 90+ players online at any given time.

As of ROM 2.4, several versions of the separate package "ROM MUD" ship with our OLC installed. Additionally, our OLC is a part of 1stMUD and QuickMUD. We ask that anyone using OLC with their software include our names in your "Credits" command, and during the login "Based on NiMUD by Locke and Surreal"

Prior versions of this software were distributed under a different license.

Compliance reminder if you use "The Isles OLC" or "ILAB/OLC", "ROMolc" and others.

Dear MUD Administrator:

KaViR and others have slowly erased from all online code repositories of MUD software the names and historical MUD server code that is associated with the original "The Isles 1.1 OLC" known also under other names. They have created "FUD" around this code-base and The Isles NiMUD for their own personal reasons, and have revised history in their own favor and not to be historically accurate. This degrading performance was brought to you by Richard Woolcock.

Files originated from:
[Link removed - user banned]
[Link removed - user banned]

(See: [Link removed - user banned] for evidence that NiMUD was once hosted, although not all versions that were on ftp.game.org were hosted here since only 2 files are seen inside the NiMUD directory.)

While code released by Jason Dinkel was in the public domain, the OLC was freely distributed under a license and that license has been ignored by subsequent revisionists who have released updates or unofficial ports of this code. The original license was in the Isles 1.1 code base which was distributed along with The Isles license. That code base is now only located in the ftp.game.org one-shot download and is not hosted on any of the other code repositories of which there are only 2.

If your MUD contains: EnvyOLC, "ROMolc", "IvanOLC", "Sam's OLC" and several other MUD OLCs which utilize a modal editor "MEDIT" "OEDIT" "REDIT" and include a "RESETS" command, or use area files with keywords like "#AREADATA" and "#ROOMDATA", then your MUD is using an OLC which is based on The Isles OLC, and is part of the NiMUD source code package. It is owned by its surviving author, myself, and to preserve its open source integrity, we request that you comply by placing the following notices into your software:

In the title sequence, during login, near the Diku authors, pick one of the two following taglines:

1)
Contains code from NiMUD by Herb "Locke" Gilliland and Chris "Surreality" Woodward

or

2)
Based on NiMUD by Locke and Surreal


In the help files, there should be a help document viewable by anyone (by typing 'help credits') that is called "NIMUD" and contains the following credits notice:

------------

This software contains code that originated in NiMUD as The Isles OLC by Herb Gilliland and
Chris Woodward. The "online creation" system was first released in 1993 for Merc/Diku muds.
Parts are copyrighted (c) 1993-2009 H. Elwood Gilliland and Chris Woodward (deceased).
Originally ported to "pure" Merc by Jason Dinkel and later adapted for use with ROM as ROMolc.

NiMUD and its latest version of OLC can be found at: SourceForge.net: NIMUD (Multi-User Gaming Engine): NIMUD (Multi-User Gaming Engine)

If you or the administrators of this MUD paid for a copy of this software or one of its derived works,
you have been defrauded and should contact the appropriate authorities immediately to try to get
your money back.

The authors of OLC would like to thank:

Kalgen of Zebesta - world interaction, area detail, combat
Kahn, Hatchet and Kith of Envy Mud - user-friendliness, portability
Morgenes of Aldara - innovative, intelligent ideas, code
Alander of Rivers of Mud - good debugging!
Surreality - the late great chris cool

We also salute all those who have come before us, namely those who wrote the
innovative mud softwares of Silly, Diku, Copper, Circle, Merc and Aber.


--------------


Also, Jason Dinkel added the following requirement to the OLC itself, which your mud may or may not be in compliance with. A command "version" must exist in the OLC and display the following messages:

/*
* The version info. Please use this info when reporting bugs.
* It is displayed in the game by typing 'version' while editing.
* Do not remove these from the code - by request of Jason Dinkel

*/

#define VERSION "ILAB Online Creation [Beta 1.3]"

#define AUTHOR " By Jason([email redacted])\n\r" \

" Modified for use with ROM 2.3\n\r" \
" By Hans Birkeland ([email redacted])"

#define DATE " (Apr. 7, 1995 - ROM mod, Apr 16, 1995)"

#define CREDITS " Original by Chris 'Surreality' Woodward ([email redacted]) and Herb 'Locke' Gilliland ([email redacted])"

#define ADDONS " Mudprogram's (Mobprogram, Objprogram and Roomprogram) originally\n\r" \

" by the SMAUG development team\n\r" \
" Ported to EmberMUD by Thanatos and Tyrluk of ToED\n\r" \
" (Temple of Eternal Death)\n\r" \

" Tyrluk - [email redacted] or [email redacted]\n\r" \
" Thanatos - [email redacted] or [email redacted]\n\r" \

" Heavily modified by Zane ([email redacted]) "

Oooo, pretty sneaky coming over here, registering, and posting your lies while I was over on TMS wondering if August had come early. I'll follow their lead, sorry, but ye be banned now. Bye!

Oh, and time to castrate those links - I'm not about to feed you traffic from here either.

And for good measure I'm reporting your code as a license violation to the good folks in charge of Google Code.

Funny thing is, I'd been considering pointing out today that Locke had been strirring up a ruckus at TMC for the last few days and then had decided that it wasn't really even worth mentioning... Guess Locke felt differently.

How ironic -- at TMC, KaVir warned him a couple of days ago that he was going to submit Locke's muds for a TMC audit and that someone was probably going to submit his code to Google Code for license violations. After KaVir said, yesterday, that he'd followed through on the TMC audit already, here you are following through on the other half.

Indeed. He also appears to have been banned at TMS where he raised another shitstorm of threads. If his goal is to get cut off from every possible avenue he could promote himself, it's working.

Could he possibly be consciously trying to do us all that much of a favor?

I believe yesterday, or the day before, Drizzt said he was going to report him [Locke] to Icculus for intentionally skirting the profanity rules there, so if that's his goal, he might just get his wish.

It would be nice, but we'd have to wait for next year to be sure this doesn't just happen again under another alias.

But of course it will, you can't really think he'd be able to stay away from the drama he creates each visit longer than that.