DikuMUD


DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of MUD. It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Commonly referred to as simply "Diku", the game was greatly inspired by AberMUD, though Diku became one of the first multi-user games to become popular as a freely-available program for its gameplay and similarity to Dungeons & Dragons. The gameplay style of the great preponderance of DikuMUDs is hack and slash, which is seen proudly as emblematic of what DikuMUD stands for.
Diku's source code was first released in 1990.

Development and history

The making of DikuMUD was first announced on Usenet by Hans Henrik Stærfeldt March 27, 1990. At the time Tom Madsen, Sebastian Hammer, and Stærfeldt were the only developers, joined by Michael Seifert in June 1990. Stærfeldt stated that their intention was to create a MUD that was less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more like Dungeons & Dragons.
The first DikuMUD was in working development as early as October 1990 and officially opened publicly running at freja.diku.dk port 4000 on February 3, 1991.
A second DikuMUD appeared in January 1991, running at hayes.ims.alaska.edu. In March 1991, the first public version of DikuMUD, known as Diku Gamma, became available at beowulf.acc.stolaf.edu. Afterwards the DikuMUD at freja.diku.dk was shut down and the game and development moved to alfa.me.chalmers.se.
Other Diku Gamma MUDs appeared in March 1991 running at eris.berkeley.edu, followed by a multiprocessor version running at sequent.berkeley.edu. By early April 1991, there were DikuMUDs running at spam.ua.oz.au, goldman.gnu.ai.mit.edu, bigboy.cis.temple.edu, and elof.iit.edu.
Diku Alfa was released in July 1991 and the DikuMUD team hereafter continued with the development of DikuII. That version was however never released to the public but continues to run today under the name of Valhalla MUD.

Last Official Release

On June 21st, 2020, Michael Seifert released DikuMUD III for HTML 5 with Websockets. This is now the last official release of DikuMUD.

DikuMUD license

The original 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, 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. However, DikuMUD and its derivatives are developed in the same manner as these similar software production practices.
In February of 2020, the authors of DikuMUD announced that the source code would be relicensed under the LGPL, but also remain optionally available under the original license. Users of the original DikuMUD code can now choose which license under which they would like to redistribute it.

Legacy

In his book Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle cited DikuMUD as one of the five "major codebases used for virtual worlds". Bartle further described how DikuMUD went in the opposite direction to TinyMUD and LPMud, by providing a very well organised hard-coded game that ran "out of the box".
It has been proposed by Raph Koster that Diku has resulted in the greatest proliferation of gameworlds due to being the easiest to set up and use. He further pointed out that "Diku codebases did eventually popularize many of the major developments in muds", and that the Diku gameplay provided inspiration for numerous MMORPGs, including EverQuest, World of Warcraft and Ultima Online.

EverQuest controversy

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 "based on Dikumud". 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, given that the chief designer, Brad McQuaid was an avid player of SojournMUD and TorilMUD that was based on the Sequent DikuMUD derivative, and reported to that effect on Usenet. 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. 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.