[Opensim-dev] Clarification on Licencing and Moving Forward as a Community

[James Stallings II]

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 <lopes at ics.uci.edu>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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Opensim-dev mailing list
>> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
>> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
>



-- 
===================================
http://simhost.com http://osgrid.org
http://twitter.com/jstallings2
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/770/a49
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20101101/b6e4d0f0/attachment-0001.html>