Um, Hello??? "Marius, since you have not been actively maintaining the MudOS project for some time now, I would like to ask for your blessing to take over the project." That's all it would have taken to get my blessing, either implicitly as a result of my silence (which is most likely what you would have gotten), or explicitly by my saying so in response. MudOS is a project that has been contributed to by a great many people over the years in a controlled (albeit not very tightly) and guided manner. The torch has always been passed willingly by the previous maintainer to the next. I would have passed the torch long ago myself if I weren't so lazy about it. Others have asked, and they've been met with silence for no other reason than I'm lazy and typically ignore any email that contains the word MudOS. If they then went on to claim maintainership of the project, I would have nothing to say about it. You, however, I have never even heard _OF_ before now, never mind _FROM_. At the very least, it's common courtesy to ask permission or for a blessing in matters such as these. What you are doing now is creating a whole new distribution of MudOS that is presumably not at all compatible with the _MANY_ versions of MudOS that have been released over the years since 0.9.20 by Beek, and subsequently myself. You're using the name MudOS, a name to which you are most certainly _NOT_ entitled, and you're using a completely different versioning scheme. What you have is a completely different derivative of MudOS. Legal issues and other "minor" roadblocks aside, that's akin to me saying hey, I branched the Linux 0.99pl14 kernel back in '93, continued making changes independent of the official Linux kernel, and now I'm releasing it as Linux 1.0. Oh yeah, it's not compatible with Linux 2.6 or whatever the current official version is. Do you not see the problem with what you are doing? MudOS is at v22.2b14, which was released on 12-Dec-2003. Since that time, there has been a small amount of traffic on the mailing lists dedicated to MudOS where people have submitted bugs and others have contributed back solutions to the problems. While MudOS may be "dead" from the standpoint that no official release has been made in a year and a half, the community is not dead, and there are still official channels by which the community communicates. In fact, I see your email address in the mailing list subscriptions, so you are well aware of what's been going on with respect to MudOS and that there is a home for it. You cannot claim ignorance. Were it not clear who the maintainer of MudOS was, that it had a home, or that it had any kind of active community, I would not have a problem with what you are doing, and perhaps nobody else would either, because nobody would care. In the end, I don't much care about MudOS anymore myself; otherwise, I would still be actively maintaining it. What I do care about is people laying claim to something that is not theirs. If you want to release the code you've produced based on MudOS 0.9.20, nobody is going to stop you or say a word about it so long as you do not continue to use the MudOS name and abide by the terms of the licensing under which the code you've used as a base has been contributed, which most certainly includes attribution. Now, I know who you are (at least that you exist anyway) and what you're doing. I don't like it, but ultimately there isn't anything I can or would be bothered to do about it other than give you this public shaming. Though you do not need it, you have my blessing to release what you are fraudulently releasing as MudOS 1.0 under any other name to which you have a right. You do not now--nor will you ever--have my blessing or permission to release _anything_ under the MudOS moniker. Am I clear? This response will be posted by me to the official MudOS home at http://www.mudos.org/ as well as the MudOS general discussion mailing list. Since you're subscribed to that list, you will see that it is so. On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:55:48 -0400, Edison wrote (in article ): > MudOS lives! I just completed a hack-a-thon on the > MudOS driver that has been running a production LPMud for over ten years. > > This is quite a bit different from the more recent MudOS drivers. I > branched in 1995. This has the features of MudOS_0.9.20 without all the > bugs. It also has some nice enhancements. The really gory part was I had > to rollback a lot of the "fixes" to the compiler/interpreter in order to > fix them correctly (Think lvalue lifetime bug and other things that peed > on the LPC bytecodes.) I also fixed that nasty: > > Warning: Error in the '%s' function in '%s' > The driver may function improperly if this problem is not fixed. > > This means the safe_apply function doesn't actually crash the driver on > error anymore. So anyway, it runs a lot of "classic" distribution > mudlibs, essentially anything that would run under MudOS_0.9.20. Did I > mention it hasn't crashed in over 4 months of running a busy MUD? > > Note that the documentation isn't really up to date. You have to read > ChangeLog to get a clue as to what is new and what is fixed. Also, LPC->C > is not functioning because I haven't maintained it. > > If you chose to muck with this feel free to ask me for support. > (Constructive) feedback would be appreciated. I'll set aside a certain > number of hours per week to deal with support/clean up. I would > appreciate volunteers for clean up and documentation. > > This is available for ftp from ftp://mudos.dyns.cx. The new > version is "MudOS_1.0_Source_Only.tar.gz." MudOS_0.9.20 is there as > well which you will need for documentation as my releases will be source > only initially until the doc's are updated. Also, there's a special > version of yacc you may use in place of your normal yacc. This is an > optimizing version of yacc derived from an old Amylaar yacc. > > -Ed. >