I know I will miss Zulg, and also Santa Zulg which was always something
that I (and many others) looked forward to. Every year his improvements and
additions were a breath of fresh air that attracted players, old and new alike.

With that in mind, I wonder if CF can benefit from getting more ppl to write code.
I bet there are many players who are experienced software engineers and write
C/C++ code for a living. I don't know what the process of becoming a coder
for CF is, so I have to assume that the usual factors come into play (trust issues)
and that one will have to go through the hero-imm, area writer and so on route.

I can only speak for myself, but this process is obviously very time-intensive and doesn't align
with my interests as a programmer; I love to program and I love playing CF but
not the other stuff.

I would like to write code, for free, that I would be also willing to permissively
license (e.g. BSD) or even completely give away by transferring copyright so that
it can be used by CF in whatever way those who control the IP think it should.
I would also be willing to sign an NDA or other similar contract. I know there are
others who can and may want to do this sort of thing.

Is this something that can be further discussed or are the staff members
completely antithetical to this idea?

The issue is trust. You have to really trust someone before you give him or her access to the code. Even if you only give him "read" access and force a trusted party to review, approve and commit his work, you still have to trust him not to abuse whatever info he might glean from having direct access to the code base.

Which is why I mentioned NDA/contract that every software firm uses to
deal with these issues. Do you really think that someone is going to risk
his professional reputation as a software engineer so that he can abuse
a MUD? Not to mention the legal ramifications.

The problem with NDAs (which we do have) is that yes, you have legal recourse when someone violates them, but CF still has to invest considerable resources to exercise that legal recourse. At that point, the damage is done -- damage that CF would probably never fully recover from.

Considering there are prep lists complete with vnums (numbers only immortals can see) circulating on forums out there, I think everyone can understand why the CF code is protected by circles within circles.

if he wants that is. I assume he must have built up enough goodwill through out the years.

All you really need is the internal structure which isn't going to be all that secret anyway. Characters have stats, those stats are access by function X etc. If there was decent documentation on the functions themselves, you could share every function definition and the comments on what it does without anyone needing to see the actual code definition of said function (at least to code new stuff, making bug fixes is another matter).

Plenty of apps offer API as well, which would probably be more work, but could get you similar results in an even more controlled way.

There is also a fallacy that the source code for CF needs to be secret. The Imm staff has always wanted it to be secret, but that doesn't mean it has to be in order for CF to be successful. It doesn't mean that if it wasn't secret that CF would be less successful. Those might be true, but it isn't a given, no matter how much you assume it is.

An NDA only really has teeth if you:

a. expect to be sued when you breach it, and/or

b. have a reputation to uphold that would be tarnished by your having broken an NDA.

With respect to (a), Carrion Fields LLC is probably on the "not very likely" side of the "willingness to incur the expense of actually suing someone" spectrum.

With respect to (b), not everyone who might be asked to sign the NDA is a software developer in his day job.

There are also forms of "abuse" that an NDA wouldn't cover, or that would be extremely hard to pin on the abuser.