What is the relationship between Nightmare and Dead Souls?
It appears that Dead Souls began as a “development” MUD. This means that while Descartes ran his own MUD, he also worked on improving that MUD’s lib. It is unwise to make major changes to a MUD that people are playing on, so the Dead Souls development MUD was one which served as a platform to develop, extend, and improve the Nightmare lib without risking harm to active players. Sometime after the release of the Nightmare IV mudlib, Descartes decided to withdraw it from distribution. Based on their interpretation of copyright law, people now do not distribute the Nightmare mudlib on Internet servers. However, somewhat inexplicably, Descartes released the mudlib for his development mud, Dead Souls, into the public domain. This meant that the Dead Souls mudlib was completely free to be used by anyone in any way they chose, be it distribution, modification, spindling or folding. Because Dead Souls was the development mud for Nightmare Mud, which was the base of the Nightmare mudlib, the re
