On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:41:38AM -0400, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence) wrote: > We still do require a Contribution Agreement, for good and valid reasons I've > explained many times - most notably that it allows us to improve our license > in > the future. Had we not required the CA in the past, we would not have been > able to change from GPL to LGPL.
A major disadvantage of the CA, however, is that you cannot use ANY of the improvements written by TPV developers. If it were possible to cherry pick the improvements of -say- emerald, then that would boost the usability of the viewer imho. In other cases you can almost speak of obstruction of progress: For example, I'd really like to see support of shared windlight settings. This has already been written and is in operation on certain opensim grids. However, we CANNOT use it! If we want this too (and we do) then we'll have to re-invent the wheel JUST because of this license problem. It's not just the extra time that that will cost, it's also necessarily going to using a different, incompatible format, which is going to be highly annoying for the currently existing implementors and their users. Without the CA, the source code would be TRUELY open in the sense that everyone would be able to use the code from everyone and improve on that. As it is, the Third Party Viewers will base their code on viewer-development and then add extensions that only they can exchange among themselves. Extensions that the users will need at some point, so that they HAVE to use a third party viewer. 'Viewer-development' in itself will no longer be used, except by total noobs who just learned about Second Life and were fooled into thinking that that viewer is usable by reading the "official" Linden Lab webpages (that no doubt will continue to advertise the "official viewer" and the Greatest) until a few weeks later one of their friends convinces them otherwise. -- Carlo Wood <ca...@alinoe.com> _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
