[sldev] [META] GPL'd APIs (Re: Protocol Documentation)

Adam Frisby adam at gwala.net
Wed Oct 3 18:37:17 PDT 2007


This is something to be really really really careful of. Today, I'd have 
no problems whatsoever trusting Linden Lab's behaviour - but remember 
companies can be sold, or have their assets sold through bankruptcy, and 
the new owner may not be quite so generous.

It is under all circumstances best to make sure one is on decent legal 
footing at all times.

Adam

Callum Lerwick wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 18:06 -0700, Dzonatas wrote:
> 
>>How the study of that content will be handled in court is one of those 
>>things you'll have to ask your lawyers advice. The mere act to document 
>>the API itself under GPL (or GFDL or Creative Comments 
>>Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) and even copyright it still does not 
>>automatically blend (or patent) functionality and content from use of 
>>such API.
> 
> 
> Not to mention, that the copyright owners, that is, Linden Lab would
> actually have to press charges for you to actually get in legal trouble.
> And given statements that the code shall serve as documentation, and
> given what I understand to be explicit consent for libsecondlife to
> re-implement the protocol, I think they'd have a hard time turning
> around and arguing that re-implementing the protocol based on looking at
> the source is acting against their wishes.
> 
> IANAL.
> 
> 
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