DikuMUD

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DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based adventure game (a type of MUD) written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt at DIKU (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet), the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Commonly referred to as simply "Diku", it was greatly inspired by AberMUD, but Diku was one of the first multi-user games to become popular as a freely-available program for its relatively addictive gameplay and similarity to Dungeons & Dragons.

Diku's source code was released in 1991 and became the "source" of one of the largest trees of derived code from a MUD-like source code package. It has been the basis of a vast number of MUDs, including AlexMUD, Slothmud, Eris, GrimneMUD, MUME, and Sequent, as well as a number of offspring MUD engines such as CircleMUD, Merc, SillyMUD, and SMAUG.

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The first DikuMUD was in working development as early as October 1990 and officially opened publicly running at freja.diku.dk sometime in December 1990. In January 1991, a leaked copy of the code appeared running at hayes.ims.alaska.edu. In March 1991, the first official public version of DikuMUD, known as Diku Gamma, was released. The DikuMUD at freja.diku.dk was shut down and the game and development moved to alfa.me.chalmers.se.

The first Diku Gamma mud in the USA also appeared in March 1991 running at eris.berkeley.edu. By early April of 1991, there were DikuMUD's running at spam.ua.oz.au, goldman.gnu.ai.mit.edu, bigboy.cis.temple.edu, elof.iit.edu.

The last official release of DikuMUD was Diku Alfa in July 1991.

There was a minor controversy in late 1999 and early 2000 regarding whether the commercial MMORPG Everquest, developed by Verant Interactive, had derived its code from DikuMUD. It began at the Re:Game gaming conference in 1999, where the Director of Product Development for EverQuest, Bernard Yee, allegedly stated that EverQuest was "like Diku". He did not specify whether he meant the code itself was derived from DikuMUD, or if it just had a similar feeling. Some attendees had understood it to mean the former and reported to that effect on Usenet.[1] After the Diku group requested clarification, Verant issued a sworn statement on March 17, 2000 that EverQuest was not based on DikuMUD source code, and was built from the ground up.[2] In response, the DikuMUD team publicly stated that they find no reason whatsoever to believe any of the rumors that EverQuest was derived from DikuMUD code.[3]

The DikuMUD license is generous, but does not permit all possible uses. The source code for DikuMUD is publicly available at no charge, anyone can run an unmodified or modified DikuMUD without paying any royalties, and modified derivatives of the DikuMUD code can be publicly distributed. However, the DikuMUD license includes the following requirement: "You may under no circumstances make profit on *ANY* part of DikuMud in any possible way. You may under no circumstances charge money for distributing any part of dikumud - this includes the usual $5 charge for 'sending the disk' or 'just for the disk' etc." Thus, DikuMUD is not open source software as defined by the Open Source Definition (OSD), because the OSD's clause 6 requires "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor", that is, commercial users cannot be excluded. For the same reason, DikuMUD is not Free Software as per the Free Software Definition; it fails to meet the requirement that the program gives "The freedom to run the program for any purpose" (it forbids commercial purposes). However, DikuMUD and its derivatives are developed in the same manner as these similar software production practices.

  1. ^ rec.games.mud.diku thread "Sony's EverQuest admits to using Diku as a base" (misleading title). Retrieved on February 3, 2007.
  2. ^ Sworn statement from Verant. Retrieved on February 3, 2007.
  3. ^ DikuMUD's statement on Everquest. Retrieved on February 3, 2007.

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