[sldev] [legal] Armchair lawyers

[John Hurliman]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
>
> The GPL is *bulletproof*.
>   

Then why are there closed source kernel drivers available from NVidia, 
Cisco, and others? Feel free to e-mail me privately or go to a wiki 
discussion, as this licensing talk is making several peoples eyes bleed.

> 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.
>   

In my previous post I was trying to highlight the fact that it doesn't 
matter what license was chosen, or what the GPL says if LL doesn't 
choose to enforce it in certain ways. So maybe it would be a good idea 
for the interested parties to ask LL how they feel about closed source 
plugins before saying "oh this license says that, end of story". I 
actually don't develop for the Second Life client, and aside from a 
bugfix here and there don't plan to any time soon. I write independently 
developed third party applications and libraries for Second Life (that 
happen to be BSD licensed). I'll let you in on my secret plot though, 
which is to get people to stop quarterbacking these licensing 
discussions on a development mailing list. Either that or prefix them 
with [legal] or something along those lines so it can be filtered 
appropriately.

John Hurliman