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

Thomas Grimshaw tom at streamsense.net
Tue Oct 20 17:13:23 PDT 2009


That should have read "violate the license", not ToS.

~T

Thomas Grimshaw wrote:
> 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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