Re: [Legal] License Agreement

From: The Fungi (fungi@yuggoth.org)
Date: 02/25/03


On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 05:16:48PM -0500, Jason Yarber wrote:
[snip]
> I don't know if this question has been asked before or not, but
> I'm going to ask it anyways.

It has been asked *many* times before.

> Let's say I was capable of writing a mud from scratch, in a whole
> different programming language. Now, let's say I made that mud,
> look and act just like Circle MUD does. Even though all the code
> was written from scratch, would the Circle MUD license agreement
> still be effective for the code? Or would I be able to scrap that
> license and use my own?
[clip]

If it is *entirely* rewritten, you can license it in any way you
like. I personally like the BSD license, but that's just me.

However... you comment on it looking "just like CircleMUD" from
outward appearances. Note that the strings in CircleMUD are covered
under the same CircleMUD and DIKU licenses, so prompts, errors,
weather messages, zone files and the like would have to be
completely rewritten and reworded as well (from my understanding).

Having "seen the code" and then rewriting the app is only a legal
issue if you are under an NDA of some sort, for the most part.
--
{ IRL(Jeremy_Stanley); PGP(9E8DFF2E4F5995F8FEADDC5829ABF7441FB84657);
SMTP(fungi@yuggoth.org); IRC(fungi@irc.yuggoth.org#ccl); ICQ(114362511);
AIM(dreadazathoth); YAHOO(crawlingchaoslabs); FINGER(fungi@yuggoth.org);
MUD(Nergel@srmud.net:2325); WWW(http://fungi.yuggoth.org/); }

--
   +---------------------------------------------------------------+
   | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html |
   | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html |
   | Newbie List:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/   |
   +---------------------------------------------------------------+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 06/26/03 PDT