We're not lawyers either. That's why the project has consulted with
lawyers for this. The rules originally came from IBM legal (if I'm not
mistaken, although I wasn't here when that happened) and from a lawyer
based in San Diego who has recently reinforced the need for them, again.
He explained the options to move beyond them, and that's the advice that
we are following.
On 11/1/2010 2:02 PM, James Stallings II wrote:
One thing that always seems to be absent from these discussions is the
legal concept of 'estoppel'. Which, as it applies to us here,
essentially means that LL has pretty consistently and over the full
lifetime of its business demonstrated an intent to form a community of
consumers and set the terms for that consumption, and having done so,
cannot turn on that community and prosecute for consumption in kind.
Read: they've encouraged the growth of this community and continued to
support it since the beginning, and cannot now turn on it and
prosecute it for existing.
This precedent of law also applies to those who might purchase LL -
and while they may be quite disinterested in continuing support of
that preexisting community (and are in fact under no obligation to do
so), they cannot change the past relationship and cannot pursue legal
actions over it, or prevent the continued use of that which has
already left the lab on a promotional basis (e.g., the viewer source
and the communications protocols). LL have long maintained that they
wanted to produce 'the next HTML' for the '3d web'. That, coupled with
the open release of the viewer tech and protocols, are a fairly clear
presentation of intent.
Just my 0.02$L, and I am not even a lawyer.
Cheers
James/Hiro
On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Cristina Videira Lopes
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
We have been discussing these issues internally for a while. The
main issue, from an organizational perspective, is that the
project is not part of any official organization, and, as such,
cannot take signed contributors' agreements that would do away
with the strict restrictions that we have in place.
Note that these restrictions are in place for a very good reason:
OpenSim is very close to one company's product, Second Life, and
works with their GPL client. However, the license is BSD; we don't
want to put people's businesses in danger by risking claims that
there is code in here that comes from a GPL project. That's the
reason why these very restrictive policies are in place: we're
protecting the businesses that are emerging on top of the platform.
Even though we all believe that Linden Lab would never do anything
to harass the OpenSim community, we are more cautious about Linden
Lab's next owner, assuming the likely possibility that LL will be
acquired. There are a lot of sharks out there...
So, not withstanding the LGPL issue, which I agree changes things
a little bit, the best way out of these restrictions once and for
all is for us to form an official non-profit organization. That
will allow that organization to receive signed contributors'
agreements saying that their contributions are, indeed, original
-- even if they have been involved in viewer development. Such
agreements move the responsibility to the individual contributors,
instead of affecting the project as a whole, as it is now.
We are moving in that direction.
Of course, there is nothing preventing groups of people from
forming development teams that have less restrictive policies.
Risk is in the eye of the beholder...
On Nov 1, 2010, at 12:57 PM, Ai Austin wrote:
There has been a number of blog posts and descriptions
recently of developments of OpenSim that seek to extend and
solidify some of the results of the core developments. This
is great. Diversity and rapid cycles of innovation is what a
vibrant development community needs. But we need to encourage
some of the very best results of these efforts do find their
way back to core and shared developments that benefit all.
Reading the blog entries of these developments, it seems that
a big issue is our lack of clarity of the policy on excluding
those who have also been involved in developments of the
viewers under the previously restrictive licence terms, and a
clear mechanism for extending OpenSim beyond core modules t0
those things essential to make a useful environment.
A few examples include:
http://sanctuary.psmxy.org/2010/10/31/18/introducing-aurora/
http://github.com/openmetaversefoundation/fortis-opensim
http://www.meta7.com/
The recent move of the Linden labs viewer licence to Lesser
GPL is critical and completely removes the need to be
restrictive on that score. For over 20 years all developments
in my group have been Lesser GPL to encourage really
widespread and unrestricted take up of the results.
Can I suggest that
a) The Dev group now discuss this and immediately declare that
the previous restriction on excluding developers who have seen
LL viewer source code is removed due to the LGPL licence now
in effect.
b) That we adopt an approach that encourages inputs of
elements and usability extensions (via optional modules) that
are under LGPL or a suitable Creative Commons Licence.
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