[Nel] Congratulations + concerns

[Yann Morvan]

Hullo,
I've been following the development of NEL for
some time, I haven't been contributing due to lack
of spare time, but I wanted to congratulate the
Nel team for their idea and work.

However, I have one major concern with the licence mecanism.
Indeed, your idea is that what the people will pay for in
games based upon Nel is content and not code. Saying this, you 
implicitly state that content and code are completely distinct things.
It is true for the most part (graphics, sounds, AI scripts, background,
plots etc),
but I can't convince myself that it applies to the rules of the game,
for I can't help to think that for efficiency matters they should be 
hardcoded in the different services. (The reason being that because of
their level of abstraction, using a scripting mechanism would be terribly
painful and would require a design of the services architecture allowing
for total flexibility).

I played Ultima Online for 3 years, I read the rantings of lum the mad
daily, I read the dev boards of currently in development MMORPGs, I'm
aware of the specificities of the "big three" and all this leads
me to the conclusion that the rules (i.e. economy system, combat system,
advancement system etc) are a part of the content at least as important
as the rest regarding a game's interest (I wouldn't be willing to
create a MMORPG if I wasn't utterly frustrated by the current trends
in those games). 

Therefore, while I totaly agree that any improvment
or further development of Nel's features should be shared, I'd
like you to reassure me about the protection of one's rule system
in your design philosophy.

Sorry for this long mail and for reviving this probably old and well
debated issue :)

        Yann