Socially Mundane

According to HyperGrid Business web site, it’s time for OpenSim developers and founders and whatnot to celebrate as a foundation has been created that will allow things to move forward on “solid legal ground”.

From the article:

The major problem that has been plaguing OpenSim until now is that OpenSim is distributed under the business-friendly BSD license — the entire code base is open source, but companies that build commercial software on top of that code can keep their projects proprietary. For example, IBM sells a distribution of OpenSim that is optimized to work with their enterprise software for around $50,000.

However, Second Life’s viewer and the third party viewers are all distributed under a GPL license — that license does not allow for proprietary commercial distributions, and any software built using the viewer code automatically becomes open-source. If any GPL-licensed viewer code were to make its way into OpenSim, then the entire OpenSim code based would be contaminated and would have to be licensed as GPL — the six-month policy was in place to prevent that from happening.

I’m not an attorney by any stretch of imagination, I am curious how Linden Research, D.B.A. Linden Lab feels about all this.

Even though Linden Lab has released their Grid Viewer into Open Source areas, they have never released the Server software code. Which begs the question: how was the OpenSim Server Code developed?

Reverse-engineering would be the logical answer. However, reverse-engineering software is technically - to my understanding - against the law under the (woefully corrupt) Digital Millennium Copyright Act or “DMCA”. This in turn begs the question: will Linden Lab ever decide to prosecute under this provision?

Consider Apple, Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., whose been copied and copied and copied again over and over. It’s been 20-years of being copied again and again. And now they’ve finally had enough of it and are putting their proverbial foot down and drawing a line in the sand against Samsung, Nokia, and many others.

What if Linden Lab ends-up floundering 10 or 15 years from now, but OpenSim takes-off. Will the Lab then decide enough is enough and make their move?

Who knows? And allow me to be clear here: I’m just daydreaming doom and gloom. I certainly don’t know and I am not looking to project myself as being “in the know” or anything like that. This is an entirely hypothetical “Devil’s advocate” nonsensical ramble.

I just find it curious how Linden Lab allows others, including their own customers to walk all over them. Thank goodness for those to whom it matters that Rod Humble is the CEO. If I were there, I’d probably be running a pretty hard line in the sand all the way around. Starting with putting those loudmouth “customers” where they belong, then moving on toward handling any licensing issues with regard to Linden Research proprietary code.

But I’m a jerk like that.

(Source: hypergridbusiness.com)