Hah. Went through hell and back with the MUGEN community back in the day :)

It's actually an interesting history in terms of copyright ethics and open source. Story time:

Around 2000, the general convention in the US and European MUGEN community was that you could very strictly only use another creator's stuff with their permission. If you were caught using someone else's code (i.e. statemachine descriptions), hitboxes, or anything else, you would most likely be banned from the community forever. This happened to a lot of people, some decided to just leave, around others it caused a huge amount of drama.

Now, the weird part is that MUGEN was a community built entirely around ripping sprites from proprietary fighting games, and using them to build characters. Sure there were original works, but that was a small amount by comparison. But the part about asking for permission also included not using sprites that other people ripped. Ripping sprites in different ways would sometimes cause recognizable patterns, e.g. the way that palettes of PNGs were ordered.

There was a lot of culture built around this "respecting creator's wishes" idea. In particular, if you couldn't get a hold of a creator to ask for permission, you just couldn't use their stuff. Which meant all the work of creators who had moved on from the community, and couldn't be reached, was impossible to built upon. If you wanted to create a character, you were expected to start by ripping the sprites from the game yourself, or get permission to use the sprites from someone who had done so. There were several stories of well-known creators who created amazing characters, but were shunned from the community when someone found out they had reused sprites that someone else had ripped without permission.

At the same time, the original creators of MUGEN - Elecbyte as featured here - had vanished for many years. The latest official version of MUGEN they had left was Linux only, and a version before that for Windows 98. Noone used the Linux version, and it had some slight incompatibilities due to new features, so the community was stuck on the Windows 98 version. When Windows XP became popular, this caused a lot of problems because the Windows 98 version just wouldn't reliably run and DOSBOX hadn't yet been around.

However - Elecbyte had sent a Windows-Build of the newer MUGEN version (that was officially only released on Linux) to a few folks who had donated to them, before they vanished. This version not only worked under Windows XP, but also brought improvements with it, particularly a capability to use higher resolution sprites. But the whole culture of respecting creator's wishes obviously and especially also applied to Elecbyte, and they had specifically asked not to pass the Windows version around.

So obviously, this led to a situation where slowly but surely everyone used the Windows MUGEN and it became the de facto version, but noone could admit to it or talk about it. The Windows version was passed around hush-hush, everyone holding up appearances that they certainly would never disrespect Elecbyte by using it against their wishes.

Crazy times :)

In 2007, things came to a head. Me and a couple other folks decided to completely turn mugenguild.com, then the largest MUGEN community (I don't know if it still is), on its head. We changed our policy to fully accept reusing other people's work, that we wouldn't police creator rights, saying that this was the only way the community could prosper. We also said that WinMugen was now accepted to use, because sticking to the DOS version was stupid and would be the death of the community sooner rather than later.

Some people flipped out over this. There were comics drawn of the involved people (including me) pissing on creators, a new community was created (RandomSelect) as the declared new bastion of creator rights. There were pages and pages and pages of a whole spectrum of reactions, some gloating about their new freedom, others lamenting the downfall of society as we know it.

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times :)