[sldev] Re: [PROTOCOL] Protocol Documentation

[Zha Ewry]

This was the point I was on at office hours yesterday. For better, or worse,
GPL is an impediment. It is fine for people to say "GPL doesn't stop you
from looking at the code." On a personal level, I tend to understand, and
maybe even agree with that premise. On a pragmatic level, and having dealt
with IP lawyers, on a regular basis for a long time, the actual. real world,
non idealistic effect of the GPL has been exactly as Sean describes. Lawyers
raise red flags. People ask the question "Where is the line between what is
safe to look at and what is not safe to look at."  Pretty soon, the answer
is "Just don't look." I won't argue about whether that position is legally
necessary, or sane, or useful. But, I will observe, it is the position a
*LOT* of people take.

I will further observe that in most code which implements a protocol, there
tends to be a good and pretty strong boundary between code which parses and
manages the protocol and code which does the actual heavy lifting behind the
scenes. When this is the case, one very easy way for an institution to mark
the line between what they view as the protocol, which they want to share,
and the internals, which they want to keep protected, is to mark them as
such. Of course, the way we mark our intent, in these spaces, is through
things like licenses, copyright, trademark and patents. If a hypothetical
organization wanted to make very clear, that "these bits we are happy with
your  using freely" and "these bits we think are our core, proprietary
material, and we don't want them stolen for commercial use."  one very clear
mechanism would be to license the public bits in a nice permissive,
unambiguous fashion, and the proprietary bits in a more restrictive fashion.
Just an observation.

There are ways around these impediments.distilled extracts based on the
source code, in non programatic form is one of  them. (Such as John';s
writeup) But.. in the annoying, pragmatic real world, where some of us
actually have to log on, from time to time, the impediments are real, and do
clog up the works.

- Zha


On 10/3/07, Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 03:32:34PM -0700, John Hurliman wrote:
> <snip>
> > LL: the source code is very clear on how all of this works
> > Others: the viewer isn't documentation, it's GPL licensed source code
> > that is neither a preferred medium for documenting a protocol nor a
> > license-compatible method of providing docs
> > LL: it is very clear documentation
> > Me: so we can look through the SL viewer source code to learn how things
> > work and reimplement it in BSD licensed libsecondlife correct?
> > [13:31]  Rob Linden: Eddy, as long as you don't steal code, yes
> > LL: so this whole discussion about documenting the capability API is
> > just so people can steal code?
> > Others: no, we don't want your source code. please keep it
> > Me: we would like documentation to write independent implementations
> though
> > Others: independent implementations... part of that whole architecture
> > working group thing
>
> There is a crux in here about the fact that code as documentation is
> made less desirable when being under a non permissive license.
>
> The OpenSim team policy has been for no developers to look at the client
> source code to ensure there isn't even the smallest hint of license
> violation.
>
> If LL wants some portion of the client code base to function as
> documentation, it would be really nice to actually relicense those
> portions under a permissive license so there wouldn't be any concern in
> looking at them.
>
> That being said, John's write up is a very good start.  Thanks for all
> the hard work! :)
>
>     -Sean
>
> --
> __________________________________________________________________
>
> Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
> sean at dague dot net                            Linux Users Group
> http://dague.net                                 http://mhvlug.org
>
> There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
> than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
> __________________________________________________________________
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFHA9tSSamXem9TdyYRAphVAJ4pYotlTtjCElRn879xjedMPvuNrACeL1Wi
> TxMgvyjlUIyXLQSMMZTdHxQ=
> =eV0T
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Click here to unsubscribe or manage your list subscription:
> /index.html
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/attachments/20071003/66127253/attachment-0001.htm