Subject: Re: Ethics, VR and Sax - History Iterates!

From: Peter Reppert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1993 06:09:58 -0800

This discussion seems parallel to the period before writers 
had royaly payments!  Before copyright laws came into effect,
writing was a gentleman's pastime.  Today there is a professional
class of writers and no one would tell a starving writer not to 
expect pay for his work.  

 By the way, Charles Dickens was central in getting royalty payments
instituted.  You probably know he was paid by the word and his works,
originally published in serial form, were then republished as books
without compensation to the author!

  I hope this doesn't make me sound ultraconservative.  I like the
notion of sharing information - it should be free, in the sense of
the public library. But one should also have a right *not* to tell 
the whole planet every personal detail about oneself.  It seems
unfair to be unable, under any circumstances, to get some kind of 
reward for all the work that goes into creating these wonderful MUD 
objects, verbs, etc..  I write and play music as a hobby, and don't
expect to make back what I put in.  But I have friends who are quite
accomplished musicians who would really like to be able to do it for
a living.  Especially tragic is the plight of jazz music - will VR
programmers be like sax players?        

p.s. - can anyone recommend articles or likely journals/newsgroups with 
information on using MUDs for conferences, etc.?  For starters, I want to 
set up a virtual meeting room on my workstation.  (I've copied the lambdaMOO
software with the idea that it's one of the most flexible).  If that flies, 
there are several additional (novel, I think) features I have in mind.

---

From: Tamzen Cannoy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1993 20:31:40 -0800

> there are several additional (novel, I think) features I have in mind.
Well at the risk of blowing my own horn and/or offending anyone, I will 
mention that Meeting Space(tm) ships next week. This is the first 
commercially available software which is a business MUD (that I know of 
anyway).

It is specifically for running a variety of business meetings in a text 
and graphics based virtual reality. Currently it is Macintosh only but we 
have the NT server going and a Windows client not far behind.

We have tossed the idea of putting it up on the INternet at some point 
for interested parties to take a look at. It runs over AppleTalk and 
TCP/IP and (soon) IPX.

It's our own code, written from scratch but keeping a lot of the generic 
conventions of MUDS while moving them to a GUI.

I'll talk about it more if people want, but don't want to go on unless 
there is interest.

Tamzen Cannoy
President, World Benders