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

[Robert Martin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:10 AM, Morgaine
<morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Okay im going to try to bridge things here

1 any claim that this policy Can Not Be Understood by Mortals is
obscene and means that the policy should be rewritten (or have a
binding explanation document attached)

2 Liability for coding errors should be limited to break fix only not
"criminal" charges

3 Liability for Illegal features (copybot obvious greifer functions
god mode stuff) should only be charged when THE ORIGINAL VIEWER CODE
HAS SAID FEATURE OR THERE ARE DOCUMENTS SHOWING HOW TO ALTER THE CODE
(original in this context meaning the source archive(s) as downloaded
from 3PV website).


to show how this should work lets say i decide to have some "fun" and
i download both the Kirstens viewer source code and the Emerald source
code. I then extract the patches needed to do the export function from
Emerald and chop out the perm locks and then merge the patches into my
copy of Kirstens (note any scans will show me as running Kristens) i
then go "shopping".

Under the 3PV policy Kirsten would be banned for writing a "copybot"
viewer that she/he did not actually write. This is the core of what is
wrong with the policy as written.

Of course the same patch process could be done to a normal LL viewer.
-- 
Robert L Martin