[sldev] Armchair lawyers (was: Plugin Licensing)

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sun, 2007-04-08 at 19:52 -0700, John Hurliman wrote:
> Are more and more CS majors going to law school these days, or is it 
> lawyers that decide to start programming? If I violated the Second Life 
> GPL, no one on this list has the power to do anything about it except 
> the Linden Lab corporation, so wouldn't it make sense to look to them 
> for any guidance on licensing issues?

Any open source programmer worth their salt should know their way around
the licenses they base their livelihood on.

The GPL has been at the very center of the recent Open Source movement.
I've watched it get attacked from all sides for nearly a decade. And it
has survived. The battle has been won, open source has proven its
legitimacy in the corporate world. It is no longer just a bunch of CS
majors hacking stuff in their spare time. Most development on the Linux
kernel, for example, is nowadays in fact corporate sponsored, paid work.
(And Red Hat tops the list. All you Red Hat haters can go partake of a
phallus...)

http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/

Major names like IBM, Dell, SGI and Novell have based major parts of
their business on "GNU/Linux", and thus the GPL. Their is no doubt that
their lawyers have been over the GPL with a fine toothed comb.

The GPL is *bulletproof*.

I know what you're doing. You just can't give up hope that maybe Linden
Lab will grant you an exception so you can develop whatever closed
source plugins you have in mind. But the fact is, Linden Lab has said
all it needs to say by the simple act of choosing the GPL.

Get over it.
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