[sldev] Re: [Opensim-dev] Voice Module

[Jason Giglio]

Ryan McDougall wrote:

> It creates a situation where you can be accused to violating the GPL by
> trans-coding, intentionally or not, SL viewer code from GPL to BSD, and
> open up a small community to a legal dark cloud.

It's written in a different language entirely.  It would be a challenge 
to intentionally violate copyright in this way, much less unintentionally.

> Me personally, I'm not a big fan of that interpretation, but its one
> upheld by US court case law, risk-averse corporate lawyers for a major
> 3-letter computer company, and more importantly risk-averse OpenSim core
> developers.

In a company with thousands of developers, it would be easy for someone 
to "accidentally" use lots of verbatim GPL code.  That is to say, 
blatant and massive infringement carried out by a single employee. 
That's not an issue for a smaller project.

I'd like to see this case law.  As I've said before, this is akin to 
saying a musician is not allowed to listen to any music, because then 
everything he produces from then on might possibly be derivative. 
That's bullshit.

For your project, it seems to me that it makes more sense for everyone 
to be very familiar with the SL Viewer source code.  If there were a 
potential infringement, you'd notice it quickly.  With this policy of 
"no looking"... you'll never know if that new patch coming in is 
dangerously close to code from the client.

> If LL wanted to clarify the situation, they're welcome to draw up a
> covenant not to sue OpenSim or its developers over the matter. That's by
> far my favorite option.

That would help the situation.

-Jason