This is probably the most thoroughly dead of any of the free software I've written. I can't even dredge it out of my subversion repository, although I know the code is in there somewhere.
The idea was to lean about writing a MOO and make a MOO that users didn't need to learn a new programming language to develop in. It was a really special experience to write perlmoo. I'd been wanting to write a MUD ever since I first saw an article about them back before I was on the net. I messed around trying to do it in pascal on the 286 laptop I was using back in the early 90's.
When I got online I spent a bit of time in some MUDs and MOOs, including PernMUSH and LambdaMOO, but I never really got sucked in as a user like some people did. I found it more interesting to run my own local copy of LambdaMOO and mess around with it than have limited access to a larger moo.
Finally figuring out how to make a completly dynamic world online, with multiple users able to log in and create new things and find their own reasons to be there was a great experience. And people really appreciated the aspect of being able to talk to the moo in a real programming language, so I knew I was onto something.
What killed it was the architecture, trying to run everything inside one perl process and rely on perl to enforce inter-user security. Once it became clear that the security and scalability issues weren't really surmountable with the existing design, I was able to let go, and dropped the project when I changed jobs. Although I did rave about it at a job interview, and ended up joining a mailing list run by the interviewer. On designing MUDs. Weird little world.
A learning process, and I'd never have been able to write mooix without doing perlmoo first.