[sldev] 3rd party viewer policy post on blogs.secondlife.com

[Thomas Grimshaw]

This is all pretty ridiculous.

The viewer code is open source. Third party viewer developers MUST make 
the source available so as not to violate the ToS.  This means that ANY 
third party viewer code might be changed at some point to add something 
malicious, there is absolutely no way of detecting, preventing or 
avoiding this. All this policy will do is drive the current "bad" 
viewers to spoof and hide their identity.

I'm pretty sure the Lindens know this, and so i'm taking this 
announcement with a pinch of salt...  it serves as a warning to 
residents, and it really doesn't affect viewer developers.

Tom.

Gordon Wendt wrote:
> If LL just keeps this as a way to note which viewers are sanctioned as 
> reliable 3rd party viewers it will be great, it wll all but elminate 
> scamming people into downloading fake versions of any well known 3rd 
> party viewers and will give the developers a mark of trust.
>
>  It worries me that extremists like Ann and Prok want this to be 
> something it's not, a mandatory full code cavity search to connect to 
> SL if you will, but the Lindens already ignore Prok most of the time 
> and hopefully they'll ignore the other extremists who essentially want 
> to close source SL again and/or make it so 3rd party viewers have to 
> be licensed to enter but cannot distribute their code any further 
> (currently a violation of the GPL so it would require a license 
> change) to prevent people using it maliciously.
>
> -Gordon
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Stickman <stickman at gmail.com 
> <mailto:stickman at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     > This is likely to have a negative impact on interest in
>     supporting the
>     > viewer at dev level.  There is little point in working on
>     something that you
>     > cannot use and test because access is denied.
>     >
>     > It's equivalent to a website allowing only specific builds of
>     web browser to
>     > connect.  With this move, you will drop right off the main open
>     source
>     > highway and into a backwater.
>
>     There's been a lot of discussion on this issue, about what should be
>     done and what makes sense, and what's uncontrollable.
>
>     From what I read, LL's making a very smart move here.
>
>     1) They're going to be officially listing the legit third party
>     viewers.
>     2) They're going to ban those residents who create harmful viewers
>     that break the ToS.
>
>     I mean, where's the problem? Did I read something wrong?
>
>     -Stickman
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