topmudsites.com: What do you think happened to LPmuds?

Link: What do you think happened to LPmuds?

Threshold posted to several forums on this topic. On the Top Mud Sites forum thread, there were some especially interesting responses (hearsay of course) on the subject of licensing drivers and mudlibs.

Lasher: [link]

I remember contacting the owners of DGD at one time before starting the rewrite - they wanted 5 figures for a license and would only guarantee performance up to 200 online, it was a non-starter. Not to imply LP can't handle more than that, clearly it can, but it was the most they'd recommend officially.

Threshold: [link]

Well, at least I know it was nothing personal when they quoted me the same thing. Maybe they came down in price a bit for you at least. (This is from memory, I may be off slightly in the details). When I spoke to the people at Skotos (that is who owns the DGD license), they wanted a minimum $100,000 for one game, with some maximum number of players that I do not recall. And that was not a one time fee. That was an annual fee.

The amazing thing is, they were actually serious. I asked the person I was communicating with if what I really needed to understand is they did not really want to license it, and instead wanted people to make muds under the Skotos banner. He was quite insistent that they really did hope to license DGD, and that this is what they thought was fair. Unbelievable.

As far as I know, they never successfully licensed it to a single person. So maybe they should have rethought that.

kugrian: [link]

On the subject of the licenses, my home MUD inquired about the possibility of using Lima and MUDOS commercially. This was the reply from Tim Hollebeek:

Quote:

For Lima alone, we're a bit hesitant to give a license which allows unrestricted use forever for a flat fee. Certainly there are quite a number of issues involved, and the exact details would need to be negotiated, but what we would be looking for is somewhere in the ballpark of $30,000 + 3% of revenue. MudOS is obviously another story all together since the ownership is much less clear. However my lawyer is looking into the issues involved, and although I most probably cannot sell the right to use MudOS commercially, I may in the near future be willing to come to some sort of agreement in which I would allow you to use commercially the code which I have contributed. Technically, you'd have to reach an agreement with all the other people who have significant claims as well, but it would definately significantly reduce your vulnerability on this front, since a considerable fraction of the code currently in MudOS is mine.

This was in 1998, so (even if all the original owners were contactable) I don't know what the story would be like now.