OpenSim Steps on Linden Lab Toes?
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.
(Source: hypergridbusiness.com)
