Re: [Nel] Something I don't understand about the license agreement.

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Leighton Haynes wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 05:12:38PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > If it is important to you to keep your IP closed, then you should use a
> > closed library rather than an open one.  There are many other libraries
> > out there that allow for keeping stuff proprietary, and some of them are
> > quite good.  Some require fees or other charges in return for use of
> > their license.
> This is a bit misleading. The game world is also your IP. This bit of IP
> would most definitely stay closed, in any commercial concern. And in general
> even most free (the beer sense, not the speech) games worlds. Having your
> game world ripped off does happen (it happened to DiscWorld mud, not that
> it's exactly 'killed' them,  but they did from memory end up making
> the sourcecode harder to get hold of). 

That's true; I meant only the IP additions to the NEL sourcecode, which
appeared to be what the original poster was interested in.  As Sal said,
the game content would be handled differently.

I'm less sure of the rules regarding dynamic linking and scripting.  I
think "linking is linking", so the former would fall under GPL rules,
whereas the latter I would hazard to guess falls more into the "content"
category and thus can be arbitrarily licensed.  But this seems like a
very grey area, and seeking out ways to get around the author's intents
and use their work on terms of dubious legality doesn't seem like a
kosher thing to do.  

In any case, you can always try negotiating with Nevrax for special
licensing terms; I'm sure they're open to making more money.  ;-)
 
Bryce