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

[Ai Austin]

At 00:46 02/11/2010, Crista Lopes <lopes at ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>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.


The policy as written assumes GPL Second Life Viewer code, which of 
course has now changed to LGPL. That makes all the difference.  I 
totally agree we cannot accept contributions based on any virally 
defined GPL code base, as the contributions policy very appropriately 
states, and should continue to state.

I personally don't think a lawyer is needed to read and act on 
LGPL... and don't see what we gain by having them read things given 
that we act as individuals and not a LLC anyway.  But if any lawyer 
gave input out of the goodness of their heart, the main question is 
whether they gave advice on the basis of the change of licence terms 
(already in place) for the SL Viewer code which was announced a few 
months ago and is now within the last month implemented by a change 
of the licence file within the viewer sources.

That's why I think a change of policy is now possible, and should be 
done immediately before communities branch off on the assumption that 
the OpenSim policy will continue to exclude them.