[sldev] ESC exempt from open source and GPL licensing?

[Corax]

Hamncheese wrote:
> I was going to stay out of this since my comment in the first round 
> earlier this week but this is crap.
I beg to differ!
>
> I started wondering exactly what was in jeopardy here and went and 
> looked at the public Jira to try to gauge how much a problem this is 
> and found that so far......crickets. Corax contributed some comments 
> on one or two jira and I found nothing for the rest. I didn't find any 
> patches...unless I just missed them. I'm really struggling to 
> understand the angst on this. If it really bothers you that you aren't 
> making money off your contributions I'm sure the people watching the 
> email behind the licensing at lindenlab.com address would be happy to 
> talk to you.
The reason you didn't find anything is because I have so far contributed 
nothing but those few comments.  If I had wanted to contribute code, I 
would have had to agree to sign away my rights to LL, and that would be 
a showstopper.  I had actually considered working on the viewer, 
squashing some bugs and so on, so as to help create a better viewer.  I 
was considering this because I thought the viewer was only GPL, which 
means my code could not be stolen for use in a proprietary product, but 
would have to be made freely available to everybody.  This is the 
purpose of the GPL, to prevent others from taking your code and closing 
it up.  However, demanding that you release all rights to your code and 
then selling that code to someone under a commercial, closed-source 
license, goes against the spirit of the GPL. I'm not a fan of "open 
source" (because not all open source is free) but of software freedom, 
which is what the GPL protects.
>
> There are only a couple of people involved in this community that 
> deserve to bitch about commercial companies profiting off their hard 
> work. And if you know what I'm talking about then you will also know 
> that they have enough community following to launch their own viewer 
> with great success. I'm not belittling any contributions anyone has 
> made but let's get real about this.
>
> As my grandpa used to say..."Put up or shut up." :)
>
> Hamncheese Omlet
If I ever contribute, it will only be to one of the community viewers, 
independent of LL.  Whether that will do as much good as contributing to 
LL's viewer is debatable, but at least my code won't be stolen.  By 
stolen I refer to taking someone's code for use in a commercial product 
without paying them for it, even if it's technically legal.

Corax Homewood