Open source license choice

[calummackervoy]

I think that the license choice depends largely on how we want people to use the MUD, which is tricky because we might not know the answer to this and standardising a shared vision between members may be an undesirable goal (from Free Fair and Alive, a book studying commons management). That said, I think that we are building a commons, and as such I think we need to be somewhat careful about threats of marketisation and enclosure (also references to Free Fair and Alive). On my own part, I think that a MUD with millions of users but intensive property rights and "pay to play" mechanisms would be a sad outcome, even if we individually became filthy rich. I don't think this is a contradiction - I think that the vision of a commons can be open-ended only from the point that the needs of the commons, and of the individuals who comprise it, have been met

The choices of license I'm outlining are:

• GPL and derivatives - no use without publishing under GPL
• MIT, BSD, Apache - permissive use
• Peer Production license - permissive use for commons, commercial users must pay

Quite loosely, the more persuasive arguments I read in a criticism of BSD from a GPL user was that not-restricting the use of the codebase only really makes sense if you have a large amount of resources, and you're just looking to "break open the market" for others. I also like the "copyleft" sentiment of GPL and I think it fits in with co-operative values

I read this criticism of GPL from FreeBSD was that "a true technical standard should not restrict use for non-technical reasons". However, I would argue that the philosophy of a project, the organisation of labour and ethics are a large part of technics, and so cannot be treated as totally separate from the specifications and codebases. They talk also about how GPL hinders the ability of people to commercialise the software, but this might be desirable

GNU recommend Apache over other non-copyleft licenses because of a clause which "prevents patent treachery"

Private Property of other content served over the MUD

Commercialisation of the MUD is not necessarily just an issue of the software itself. For example, I may use entirely open-source code, but on my world server I may privatise content and sell this to my users. Whether we want to allow this, or if we want to attempt to forcibly abolish private property, is a question I don't know my opinion on. An interesting middle-ground would be to allow it, but use license terms which requires commercial actors to pay a cut to support the MUD commons. This idea I got from Peer Production License from P2P Foundation