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

[Serendipity Seraph]

On Nov 1, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Crista Lopes wrote:

> On 11/1/2010 2:58 PM, Karen Palen wrote:
>> 
>> Is that advice documented somewhere?
>> 
> 
> Whatever the original legal advice was, it resulted in the current rules described here:
> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Contributions_Policy
> 
> For the past year or so, we have been consulting informally with a lawyer based in San Diego who is very much inside the issues. When we inquired about relaxing the restrictive rules, including the 6-month quarantine, he reinforced the need for those rules. 
> 
> We don't have a formal engagement with this lawyer yet, because the project is not an official organization, and none of us is acting on its behalf. So his advice has been informal, including a disclaimer in his emails saying "This is not legal advice," and his choosing which questions to answer. Hence it's not appropriate to make his emails public. People here should feel free to consult with your own lawyers, formally or informally, and find out what they say about these issues.
> 
> Based on what we heard from him, it looks like all core devs have now come to the conclusion that the only route away from the current restrictions is to form a non-profit and have that be the umbrella for all these legal issues, including engaging with this lawyer officially. Once documents can be signed officially, things can potentially become a lot cleaner and a lot less restrictive -- the right way.

>From what I understand of GPL the lawyer is being much too over cautious on the GPL viewer part.  It isn't so viral that just having studied GPLed code makes one bound to GPL.    That would defeat much of the purpose of free software.   IANAL but that part is nearly MS level FUD. 

- s
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