MUD2 Licensing Policy

Because of the range of applicants is so great (from international networks to hobbyist bulletin boards), MUSE Ltd has adopted a generally flexible approach to the licensing of its main product, MUD2. Each application is dealt with on an individual basis, and MUSE Ltd is always open to negotiation. That said, MUSE Ltd's opening position is as follows:

1. MUSE Ltd is a commercial company, and therefore you should charge users to play MUD2. MUSE Ltd will require a royalty, usually due monthly, which is calculated using the following method:
   
   take X% of the money you receive from your players; compare this with a previously-agreed constant amount, C; take the greater of the two figures.
   X will be at least 20; C will vary depending on how shaky your venture appears, but won't necessarily come into play until after an initial post-launch settling-down period (of up to 3 months). Note that there is normally no up-front fee required for running MUD2.
2. MUSE Ltd will only grant exclusive licenses under highly exceptional circumstances.
3. MUSE Ltd has complete editorial control over MUD2. MUSE Ltd is happy to listen to suggestions for changes, but is under no obligation to accede to your requests.
4. MUSE Ltd has complete game-management control in cases where either the reputation of MUD2 or the playability of other licensees' MUD2 games might suffer. MUD2 is an evolving product, and MUSE Ltd will supply regular updates to the game at no additional cost. However, it is inevitable in such continually developing projects that bugs will creep in, and although MUSE Ltd will make every reasonable effort to track down and remove such aberrations as they appear, MUD2 cannot be guaranteed bug-free.
5. In order not to hurt existing licensees, MUSE will not grant a licence if significant numbers of players are likely to abandon other MUD2s in favour of the proposed new one.

Aside from the above, MUD2 itself has certain practical demands. The present system runs under various flavours of Unix (eg. SVR4, SCO 3.4.0, and LINUX). In terms of computational power, it needs something like an i486/33 CPU at minumum, with around 12mb of RAM, and it occupies some 20mb of disc space (in addition to the requirements of Unix - generally around 100mb). You should usually, however, buy a machine from whatever the high-end specifications of the day are: the better the machine, the more players MUD2 can support while delivering acceptable response times. Since the MUD2 sources are in C, it should be possible to port MUD2 to other platforms, however MUSE Ltd would need to be convinced that the time and effort were worth it. Similarly, MUD2 assumes that the players can understand English, and if a translation to some other language is needed then this may prove problematical (in particular, new updates would cause additional translating).

If you're still interested, contact MUSE Ltd and we can discuss your specific situation in more detail.