A Legacy of Restrictive Software Licences for MUDs

This article has been updated since its initial posting, please see footnotes.

With the release of AberMUD in 1987, and its younger brother TinyMUD in 1989, a slew of bastard children and grandchildren spawned that would take the MUDverse by storm.

With the advent of open source codebases being made available to the public, this brought licensing and copyright issues into the equation. Unfortunately they were extremely and arbitrarily restrictive (particularly in regards to monetary concerns). MUD licensing was probably one of the only negative and short-sighted characteristics of what I've termed as the Golden Era (1987-2000) of MUDs.

Perhaps the severely one-sided commercial nature of the preceding Classic period (1978-1987) is largely what drove such an extremely polarizing reaction on the part of so many MUD coders and creators in the Golden era to enact such acutely restrictive copyright licensing. These licences tended to result in requirements that asked for bizarre terms such as :

• Credit having to be prominently displayed in all derivatives (e.g. on the login screen of a server).
• Credit/license having to be accessible internally by players.
• No commercialization or ability to make or even accept any sort of compensation (even donations!).
• Credits/license information had to be left untouched internally in all documentation, even the source code files. (Typically licenses for modern software are located in a single file).
• Documentation, supporting files, and legacy code had to be included after porting to another operating system, even if they were no longer relevant or even usable.
• Certain commands or help sections for the original codebase of the MUD had to be left untouched and accessible by players, with no exceptions.

There were even some licenses with requirements that every single person running a server had to snail-mail or email the license holders and provide them information such as your name and address and where the server was being run!

How preposterous! While some authors of works in current days may appreciate recognition or a quick message so they see what people are doing with their original work, this goes far beyond the pale.

These restrictions are completely alien and foreign to many open-source creators in modern times.

Looking at GitHub figures for 2015 we find that a staggering 44.7% of projects are licensed under the very simple and permissive MIT license. Balter, Ben (1995, March 09) GitHub: Open-source license usage on github.com. retrieved from https://blog.github.com/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ on November 1st, 2018

The MIT license is noted for being succinct and to the point. It's written in simple unambiguous language, and has the advantages of permitting commercial use, distribution, modification, and private use. This is a template of the MIT license in its entirety:

MIT License

Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Even that is nothing in the face of other licenses such as the GNU-Permissive one:

Copyright <YEAR>, <AUTHORS>

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty, provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty.

Restrictive Licensing as a whole has been on a downward trend, such as on GitHub dropping from over 60% of projects down to less than 20% (30% with branches included). That doesn’t even include the projects have adopted more permissive licensing, such as GNU-permissive or the Unlicense license (the public domain anti-copyright licence of the Internet).

What’s particularly humorous is that the license holders felt at the time that these licenses were fairly un-restrictive (compared to what, I don’t know).

"These are very generous terms for any software." -- Line from near the end of EnvyMUD's software license terms.

In a post-GPL era, no-one is seeing anything generous about any of these terms.

Redemption of DikuMUD

In a move that shocked and pleased, the DikuMUD staff released a statement earlier this month, that they were dropping their old and outdated license in favor of the modern and far more sensible LGPL

"The DikuMUD authors Sebastian Hammer, Hans-Henrik Starfeldt, Katja Nyboe, and Michael Seifert have all agreed to make their DikuMUD work available under the LGPL license. We’ve been unable to get a hold of Tom Madsen, but we feel fairly confident that he would likewise agree to submit his work under LGPL. This means you can choose yourself if you want to use DikuMUD under the LGPL or the original license.  Please note that derivative work isn’t automatically under LGPL. It would need to be re-released by its respective authors." -- An update added to the License page on the DikuMUD site (February 3rd, 2020)

While this move may feel like 'too little, too late' to some, I would counter that it is never too late to do the right thing. I applaud Hammer, Starfeldt, Nyboe, and Seifert. Hopefully the courage of Michael Seifert and the others can inspire other MUD authors to re-license and free their respective codebases.

It pains me to think of how negatively the proliferation and popularity of MUDs were impacted. Some may argue that their text-based nature doomed them to eventual obsolescence. I submit that the decline of the MUD was due to malnourishment. The most damning and damaging of the license terms were the ones that disallowed capitalization.

"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs." -- Richard Stallman

The Diku team were beaten to the punch by AberMUD by nearly 25 years, with Alan Cox and Dick Porter agreeing to release the AberMUD codebase under the GPLv2 back on December 3rd of 1996. You can definitely say, too little, too late. However, I think it is still better late than never.


March 6th Update: "On March 4th, 2020 the DikuMUD II from December 1997 was released as LGPL on GitHub" -- DikuMUD.com (2020, Mar 6) DikuMUD: Development and history. retrieved from https://dikumud.com/history/

April Update: The member of the MUD community whose diligence has resulted in these recent development is Jason Babo, also known as "Opie". He is the maintainer of the Vineyard, and an archivist of MUDs.

  Belisarius Smith