[opensource-dev] A note on preserving "NO WARRANTY" for SL TPV developers

Morgaine morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com
Tue Mar 30 03:10:57 PDT 2010


Marine, you raise a good question, but it's hard to give a reasonable answer
to a "what if" question about a totally unreasonable TPV policy.  :-)

The fact that the TPV document places the burden of liability for LL's own
bugs (and many other things) on TPV developers' shoulders despite the
extremely clear "NO WARRANTY" clauses of GPLv2, combined with Linden's
refusal to discuss it further, just shows how totally beyond the bounds of
reason this whole thing has become.

The safest approach for TPV developers is probably to find a way to avoid
falling under TPV liability at all.  This is achieved by any of the 3
alternatives that I listed, all of which employ the simple strategy of
relying on licenses that LL cannot overturn.  Unfortunately it also means
not using any new code released by LL after 30th April (not 1st April as I
incorrectly stated).

Developers can of course look at LL's post-April code, as the GPL always
allows that, but copying their code would be very dangerous since that would
bring their post-TPV rules on liability into effect, and the safety of the
"NO WARRANTY" clauses then becomes a matter for debate.  A genuine
independent re-implementation of any new Linden code would be required to
retain the "NO WARRANTY" granted by a pre-TPV GPL license, the more
different the better.  On the positive side, that's an opportunity for
making TPV code better than LL's. :-)

Note that none of this addresses how TPV developers can continue to exist in
SL though, since LL could ban you for not agreeing to be bound by the TPV.
The only thing that this strategy provides is a reasonable chance to be
protected by the "NO WARRANTY" clauses of open licenses.

Just in case some TPV developers here haven't heard, Imprudence developers
have made an official
announcement<http://imprudenceviewer.org/2010/03/26/an-important-announcement-regarding-the-third-party-viewer-policy/>listing
in detail the reasons why they have to reject the TPV policy in
order to be able to continue developing the viewer.  It is very well
reasoned, and is required reading for TPV developers.  It needed the
personal sacrifice of not developing for SL but for Opensim grids instead
(thus escaping the "TPV" definition), and personally using only the Linden
viewers when in SL.  In exchange for this, the Imprudence developers are not
subject to the TPV's outrageous conditions, particularly on personal
liability.  Any use of Imprudence in SL is then at the user's own risk and
without placing liability on the developers.

It's very sad that Linden Lab forces open source teams to these lengths.
It's not in the spirit of open source at all.  Indeed, the terms of the TPV
are quite likely to be wholly non-compliant with the GPL as applied to TPV
developers developing for SL.


Morgaine.





========================

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Marine Kelley <marinekelley at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thank you for the heads up Morgaine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the
> "no warranty" clause vanishes from the source code, then does that mean that
> LL guarantees that the code of the original viewer is bug-free ? We can't
> guarantee it as open source programmers if the original devs don't in the
> first place, and they can't expect us to remove it ourselves afterwards, so
> who is liable for the original defects if a law suit was started because of
> an exploit ?
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/attachments/20100330/b667f441/attachment-0001.htm 


More information about the opensource-dev mailing list