Often on my 11th & 12th turn I usually run right to the pub as it is. Once the plots are all developed and everything is as balanced as you can get there is no reason to change things. I often eliminate all my food production during those rounds just because I'd go straight to the pub anyways and the time I get from food doesn't earn me enough in the pub to be worth not using it for something else.

I agree being able to pick the kind of game you want to play (classic vs. mod1 vs. mod2 etc.) would be important. Having dozen different takes on a game isn't a bad thing. If you've ever played battle for wesnoth you'll see that there are a large number of mods to that game as many different people have different ideas about the details of the game. Players can choose which mod they want to play and changes/improvements to one of the mods will often help improve the program overall for both mods and classic. I believe the same type of thing could happen with planet M.U.L.E. as well.

What does the copyright have to do with anything? I'm under the impression the planet M.U.L.E. devs are not using nor even have access to the original atari/C64 versions source code or graphics. Admittedly I'm not a copyright lawyer but creating you're own game with similar gameplay is not a copyright violation. Sure you may not be able to use the name 'M.U.L.E.' without their permission but that could be rescinded at any time regardless of what you choose to do with your code. If creating your own game that has the same type of gameplay as another game is a violation of copyright then almost every single open source and commercial game is a copyright violation.

Examples are:
FreeCiv - copy of civilization
Lincity - copy of Sim City
Freeorion & Outer Space - copies of Master of Orion
Wormux - copy of Worms
MoonPy - copy of Moonbase Commander
Armagetron & glTron - copies of Tron
BOSwars - copy of Starcraft/Warcraft
Starcraft/Warcraft - copy of Dune

In addition to these specific examples there is also:
almost every MMORPG made after everquest
any FPS made after doom
any of the 500 million tetris clones

Most if not all of these games were made without any 'special permission' of the game they're based off of. I know for certain that in the example of the tetris clones that "the tetris company" will sue the pants off anyone making a game with the name of 'tetris' in it because of their trademark which is why so many of the clones are called *tris or something like 'block attack' instead to avoid this problem. It would only be a copyright violation if someone used their source code (even part of it) to create the game or ripped the graphics directly. But if you use your own code, then that is *your* code. As an example if I took your source code and tried making my own open source game then I would be violating *your* copyright (not the creator of the original atari version) since it's your code. However if I decided to make my own M.U.L.E. clone from scratch and called it D.O.N.K.E.Y. or something there is nothing either of you could do about it because I created the game myself using my own code. I would recommend asking the original creator if it's ok in order to avoid stepping on toes, especially if you want to continue using the name M.U.L.E. in the name, but be aware the code is your copyright and no one else's. The final decision of whether you choose to open source rests on the planet M.U.L.E.'s development team and no one else's. As you can probably tell I obviously think you should open source this game, it would speed up development, especially as you would get random programmers willing to implement features/bugfixes. Also it would allow those that want to recreate the original and those that want to "improve" the game to work on their own versions, although this would split the fanbase, the fanbase is already split on this issue. By allowing each group to go their seperate ways it will avoid arguments and many changes/fixes applied to one version will be applicable to the other so that it will be easier for both versions to grow together.

Going through the forums it seems like the fanbase is pretty split on whether MULE needs to identically clone the original or if the game needs modifications to be more 'fun' or 'balanced'. Personally I fall in the second camp (I especially want to see changes to the land auctions) but the best solution to this would be to simply make planet MULE open source. I'm actually a little surprised this hasn't been done or even mentioned already (at least I haven't seen mention of it). By making the game open source, more people could work on it which would speed up development. Also people interested in recreating the original can continue to do so but those that want to modify it can then mod it. The server gets updated to report whether it's a classic game or a 'mod' and people can then play what they want.