[Opensim-dev] request change for contributor agreement

[Robert A. Knop Jr.]

It is my hope in the next 6-9 months to be in a position where I'll be
able to start making real contributions to OpenSim.  There are some
things I have to work out -- I have to make sure that the IP policies of
the Unviersity where I'm going won't create problems.  However, there's
another issue:

  You have not witnessed, seen or been party to the development of the
  official Linden Lab Server Software. If you have been involved in the
  official server development your contributions may affect the
  licensing of the main codebase and we cannot accept the contributions
  without a waiver from Linden Lab disclaiming any interest in your
  contributions.

Of course, I did see a bunch of that, way back when.  The part that I
actively worked on myself was something that has no analog in OpenSim
(the "region conductor", which dealt with figuring out which servers ran
which regions).  And, it's been more than a year -- will likely have
been more than 18 months by the time I'm in a position where I'll be
able to start making contributions.

Six or eight months ago, I made some preliminary investigations into
getting this sort of waiver, asking somebody who was most likely to be
sympathetic to the need for it, and indications are that such a waiver
is probably very difficult to get.  I honestly do not believe that
Linden would want to sign such a thing.  However, I also don't think
that they should have to.  It's been long enough since I had access to
that code that there's no practical way I can steal any of it at this
point.  Would it be possible to have some sort of timeout (say, 18
months) added to this clause in the contributor agreement?

If that can't be done, then if I want to work on OpenSim I'm effectively
going to have to make my own fork of it.  I know I'll want to be working
on things related to the Physics engine, and it would be sad to me if I
were not able to contribute what I did back to core OpenSim.  It would
greatly undermine the value of what I hope to be able to do in the future.

-- 
--Rob Knop
  E-mail:    rknop at pobox.com
  Home Page: http://www.pobox.com/~rknop/
  Blog:      http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/
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