Question TbaMud license change

I don't know how DG scripts could be licensed unless they got permission from Weis and Hickman or whoever for the rights to the death gate cycle name (if that is trademarked)

DG scripts isn't related to the Death Gate book cycle AT ALL. There's no mention of characters, places, setting or anything in the code. This is an example of overthinking it While the setting in the actual mud they were originally developed for might be different, the script code has nothing to do with that setting.

Sharing a couple of letters in a title is not enough to make a claim of ownership or to have any say over distribution. Or I'd be a millionaire, since my last name has a couple of letters also found in Apple, inc.

And actually, that's one of the patches where we have been in touch with the author and gotten a positive response.

Also if the DGScripts patch did for some reason include content which infringed on copyrights for the Death Gate cycle, that would be a problem for any MUD incorporating it regardless of software license. Thankfully it does not.

Further, there seems to be some confusion over copyrights and trademarks. They are both a sort of intellectual property (as are patents), but are not otherwise related. Copyright licenses are quite a separate thing from trademark licenses.

A few years since the last post, but is there any chance this may still happen?

If there are blockers, what are they?

The blocker is, in short, that to change the license, we need to get the actual ok from all the contributors who have submitted code under the dikumud license or circlemud that is part of tbamud. And some of those contributors are unavailable (dead? perhaps, no answer was forthcoming), others are only known by their mud aliases.

I'm actually inclined to just going ahead and changing the license from v2026 onwards. None of the connections we have actually managed to establish have expressed any negative responses. We've made a concerted effort over several years to get in touch with all the developers of libraries, patches and snippets.

We can't guarantee that at developer wont pop up some time in the future, saying they're not ok with the change, meaning we then will have to reverse it. Perhaps the chance for this is low enought to go forward?

It's a tricky situation to be in and I understand the hesitancy. Just thinking out loud here...

There could be someone who doesn't like the terms of the LGPL license, but was ok with the previous license. Their code is already publicly readable on forums in the form of snippets, and also included in github repositories. If they did want credit per the old DIKU/Circle license, they probably would have included their names as part of that? I'm not entirely sure how tbaMUD handles crediting contributors via the licensing as it is currently - other than noting where it came from in the header of some of the files.

Another thing that could be considered is by posting a contrib publicly (and independently of adding it to tbaMUD itself) on a forum in the form of a snippet might mean it was included in other games as well. The author may have wanted to share it with others by giving it away freely that way?

In any case, given how the MUD community is slowing down in our current era, I would be surprised if someone took offense to re-licensing code from the 90's and early 2000's. Much of it is probably already sucked up by AI scrapers for training data at this point.