[sldev] What is the point of firstlook and giving feedback to LL

[Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden)]

I'd like to chime in and add that this is not specific to commercial 
projects either.  The FSF has a very similar policy for GNU projects: 
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright and 
that's a big part of the historical reason for the permanence of the  
fork of xemacs from emacs 
(http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html).  Many other open 
source projects operate similarly.  Projects like xemacs and the kernel 
that don't do this legal legwork are unusual I suspect, but I have no 
numbers to back that up.

-Brad

Soft wrote:
> More to it, the contributor agreement is an attempt at getting a
> single statement blessed by our legal department that the patches
> really are offered under specific terms of use. A mixture of
> differently worded offers to random Lindens through random channels
> would paralyze us. We'd constantly be stuck, trying to figure out what
> we can and can't do with code incorporating code under all those
> different offers.
>
> Even if we were a pure GPL project of this scale, as a commercial
> project we'd be mad to work without a contributor agreement. Take a
> look at the SCO debacle to see what ad hoc licensing work can lead to.
> An event like that would be trouble not just for LL, but for anyone
> else redistributing the code.
>
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Harold Brown <labrat.hb at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> The release client is not GPL.  Without the contribution agreement
>>  they can't add that code to the release client.   Which means it then
>>  can't be added to the GPL code, because that code is derived from the
>>  closed license release client.
>>