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

[SignpostMarv Martin]

Rob Lanphier wrote:
> 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.
The mapapi.net wiki is licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, which 
I'm guessing is compatible with the 2.5 license used on the SL Wiki, so 
the point of "every single contributor maintains exclusive ownership" 
doesn't apply.

> 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.
However, it's not entirely open- if a Resident is banned for whatever 
reason, or they don't access their account for a while they can 
generally no longer log into Second Life with those credentials. In the 
long run, this would affect how people are credited for their contributions.

> 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.
Using OpenID for the mapapi.net wiki means "not having to create another 
account on another service just so you can contribute as yourself"



~ Marv
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