[sldev] Requiring login on wiki.secondlife.com (Re: Open development of the Webmap API)

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi SignpostMarv,

I'm going to leave it to the folks who know the MapAPI to talk more 
about this topic.  However, I'd like to respond to one piece of this 
which is more in my domain:

On 1/16/08 4:14 PM, SignpostMarv Martin wrote:
> This is what I'm proposing: Use a publicly accessible (readable AND 
> editable) MediaWiki install that isn't restricted to Second Life 
> Residents.
>
> This would faciliate both open discussion and open development of an 
> SL Webmap API that can already be used by non-Residents.

Here's the problem with developing APIs on a wide open wiki.  If this is 
going to be an API that Linden Lab is going to be expected to implement, 
we very strongly prefer to operate in a manner that we have the 
necessary rights to implement the work product, and that we have the 
rights to take that work and submit it to a standards body if/when the 
time is right to do that.

wiki.secondlife.com is set up in such a way that contributions are 
jointly owned by you and us.  It means that we're ultimately the 
custodians of the final product, which is a level of trust we hope we've 
earned.  We could *conceivably* work via an outside arbiter instead, but 
I'm not sure there's a logical choice that we could trust.  What we 
really want to avoid is a situation where every single contributor 
maintains exclusive ownership of their contribution, since that 
effectively ensures no one is in a position to relicense the API in the 
future.

We also require the login because we want to make sure you agree to the 
Second Life Terms of Service, and that we maintain a single user 
database rather than one for each individual thing we run (wiki, forums, 
jira, etc).  Spamming has been mercifully low on wiki.secondlife.com; 
much lower than a wiki that I run outside of work on which I seem to be 
in a spammer arms race.

Since accounts are free to anyone, asking people to sign up doesn't seem 
like an insurmountable hurdle.

With respect to OpenID, we may use that in the future in some fashion, 
but that's not really relevant to the policy discussion above.  I don't 
believe that the auth mechanism we ultimately choose will have much of 
an impact on the policy, since it wouldn't change the reasons for the 
policy.

So, I'm hoping we can use wiki.secondlife.com to collaborate on whatever 
APIs you'd like us to implement.

Rob


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