Donations

[Bane]

So I never really put much thought into about whos actually paying for these servers all these years, until Pievolution went down. The admin of it did not have the money at the time to continue its services so it made me think, why cant we help to pay. Of course we have a legal binding we have to follow with the Circlemud/Diku licences. But from the looks of it, we can have a donation set up to help pay for server cost.

Here is the Circlemud Licences that pertains to making money off the Circlemud codebase



<sup>The first condition says that you must not use CircleMUD to make money in any way or be otherwise compensated. CircleMUD was developed in people's uncompensated spare time and was given to you free of charge, and you must not use it to make money. CircleMUD must not in any way be used to facilitate your acceptance of fees, donations, or other compensation. Examples include, but are not limited to the following:

If you run CircleMUD, you must not require any type of fee or donation in exchange for being able to play CircleMUD. You must not solicit, offer or accept any kind of donation from your players in exchange for enhanced status in the game such as increased levels, character stats, gold, or equipment.
You must not solicit or accept money or other donations in exchange for running CircleMUD. You must not accept money or other donations from your players for purposes such as hardware upgrades for running CircleMUD.
You must not sell CircleMUD. You must not accept any type of fee in exchange for distributing or copying CircleMUD.
If you are a CircleMUD administrator, You must not accept any type of reimbursement for money spent out of pocket for running CircleMUD, i.e., for equipment expenses or fees incurred from service providers.</sup>

Now I dont have a degree in law but I want to point out the 3rd condition.

If you are a CircleMUD administrator, You must not accept any type of reimbursement for money spent out of pocket for running CircleMUD, i.e., for equipment expenses or fees incurred from service providers.


Now the keyword here is reimbursement. Reimbursement is an act of compensating someone for an expense.

If we donate money to help pay for the server, and this money is not pocketed by the Admin of the server in order to make up for what they had paid to maintain the server, and is only used for the server maintenance. Then I don't see this breaking the compliance of the licences.

Now of course if we set up a donation, donating will not grant you any special privileges, In or out of game.
You will be in no way rewarded for donating and you are not required to donate.
All donations would be used in maintaining the servers. These servers would include our Website, our main game port 4dimensions.org 6000, Our build port 4dimensions.org port 6002, Our testing port  4dimensions.org 6001, and would also cover the costs of our Coding port, Which was Pievolution.org.
 The donations received will not be used to reimburse anyone in the cost of maintaining the server or upgrading server hardware.


CirclueMud Licenceshttp://www.circlemud.org/license.html\
Dikumud Licences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD#DikuMUD_license


Now im unsure of the costs of all this, if any admin would care to share what they are spending but overtime it adds up, and I dont see why if we wanted to help out  we couldn't. Anyways any thoughts on this, there are serveral ways to set up an account for donations.

-Bane

[Molly]

As much asd I appreciate any offer to help financially, I am pretty sure that the Circle code won't permit us to accept any donations at all, and that it includes the server costs.

Mordecai used to pay for the server before, at present I am footing the cost, (or rather my aunt is, and she hasn't complained about it so far).

It might be a different matter if any money went directly into the server's account instead of through the admin, but I am really not sure about that either.

Perhaps Mord knows, the server account still is in his name.

[Bane]

From the way its written as long as the money is not used to reimburse anyone that is paying for the server then we can donate to pay for the server. So as long as the money is spent on the server, and not used to pay back the person that paid for the server then its fine.

So if Molly used the donations to pay for the server on January its okay,
But if Molly paid for the server herself on February she couldn't take any donations to reimburse herself for what she spent out of pocket for that month.
If Molly paid half of the server out of pocket in March and paid for the other half from the donations then its fine.

Regardless of whos account the money is going into, as long as its not used for that person to make a profit and only spent on server maintence then from my understanding it is not breaking the Licences.

This is taken directly from the Circlemud licences

Code: [Select]

If you are a CircleMUD administrator, You must not accept any type of reimbursement for money spent out of pocket for running CircleMUD, i.e., for equipment expenses or fees incurred from service providers.

Now the keyword here is reimbursement. Reimbursement is an act of compensating someone for an expense.

If we donate money to help pay for the server, and this money is not pocketed by the Admin of the server in order to make up for what they had paid to maintain the server, and is only used for the server maintenance. Then I don't see this breaking the compliance of the licences.

It would be best if it went into the servers account or a new account is made so we can show proof of how the money is spent if it ever rises in a legal fashion.