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tbaMUD LGPL Dead in Water

As the race to upgrade software licenses in the MUD community continues, the usage of handles/usernames/nicknames by coders, the death or disappearance of the programmers, and the lack of updates to contact information has resulted in a stalemate for the tbaMUD project (a fork of the CircleMUD project).

While CircleMUD was able to upgrade its license to LPGL after DikuMUD move last year, the MUD community was hoping to see the dominoes continue to fall.

However, there's been a pretty nasty snag when tbaMUD attempted to get with the times.

"Indeed, we've started the work in tracking down the people who have contributed over time. Quite a few of the authors of the patches have replied back with their approval (so far we've seen little negative feedback once the meaning of the LGPL has been explained, as above). However, efforts have been mostly halted since about August 2020 due to other commitments eating into the maintainers' time.

I've tried tracking down a couple of developers who we have little information about (a mail address and a mud name, basically) via the circlemud mailing list, unfortunately with slim results to show for it." --welcor (https://github.com/tbamud/tbamud/issues/95 - Relicensing to LGPL #95)


The outlook doesn't look to good, and the maintainers of the project are probably unwilling to go back and re-write new code to get their project out of the punishingly stupid and archaic license its currently under.