[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

[Melanie]

The reason StoredInventory is closed source and very restrictive is
that exporting/importing of items that are not compatibly licensed
is, in effect, copybotting.

The risks in making such a tool open source is that any restrictions
can be trivially removed by the knowledgeable user, creating what is
in effect the ultimate copybot.

The people who made StoredInventory were particularly worried about
SecondLife, since open sourcing the project would have allowed
people to remove the protections that were placed to enforce SL
compliance.

This may result in SL suing the program creators as well as the
program users and also may result in users of the program, whether
these individuals infringe SL TOS or not, being banned from SL,
possibly permanently.

Exporting content not licensed for export, or protected by a grid's
TOS, is theft. Uploading it to another or even the same grid is
copybotting, which legally is plagiarism. Profiting from it by
selling the copies may also be fraud in some legislations.

My advice is to consult a lawyer at your place of residence, as in
some jurisdictions producing software capable of performing these
actions is a criminal offense.

IMHO, open source is a very bad idea for this type of software.

Best regards,

Melanie

On 15/11/2012 10:44, Snowcrash Short wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing user
> inventories, which I will release as an open source tool in two weeks, some
> of the features may be relevant to grid operators.
> 
> The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the backing assets
> of the inventory items really should be controlled by the user. The tool is
> born out of a frustration of having visited a number of grids. Each visit
> to a new grid presents me with an empty inventory, and I can then spend
> time searching for suitable item, clothing, attachments and
> other accessories.
> 
> For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to backup my
> inventory to a local cache and then upload the contents to another grid.
> 
> If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download mechanisms may
> have some impact on the grid-operators, hence this email to serve as a
> notice.
> 
> The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a number of import
> agents, which can import the users inventory and backing assets to a local
> database, and a number of upload agents which can upload inventory content
> to a specific account.
> 
> Backup/Import
> There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files and one which
> works very much like I believe "Stored Inventory" works, which can backup
> the inventory of an avatars inventory. Avatar backup/Import is governed by
> a policy. Currently there are two policies, one complying with a very
> restrictive interpretation of the Linden Labs policy on backups, and a
> completely unrestricted policy, where anything that can be downloaded will
> be downloaded.
> 
> When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if the account is
> for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of policies to policies
> suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do not know if other grids have similar
> policies, I can well imagine that Avination has a similar restrictions, and
> would like similar logic implemented to restrict the download. Any grid
> operator which would like to have backup governed by a more restrictive
> policy are invited to notify me and I will attempt to implement the policy
> prior to the first release of the source code. or supply patches at a later
> time.
> 
> Upload/Export
> MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory
> content, traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access to the
> inventory and asset web-services.
> Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will create new
> assets, and as of my latest read of the Open Simulator code the asset store
> does not support "single instance assets", i.e. it does not use a checksum
> to verify if the asset already exists, for this reason MyInventory prefers
> to upload using direct access to asset and inventory web-services.
> 
> I would propose that the grids which chooses to support MyInventory augment
> their "GridInfoService" entries with the url's for the asset and inventory
> web-services, e.g.
> 
> [GridInfoService]
>     assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
>     inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org
> 
> Best regards
> Snowcrash
> 
> 
> 
> 
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