Kudos to Rezzable

I recently took RightasRain Rimbaud to task over his proposals regarding Builderbot – not so much for the tool itself, I openly agree that is has a potential use – but in the manner in which he initially proposed releasing the tool into the open source environment sans any means of protecting people’s content, and then attempting to justify the original decision in the face of a strong backlash from the content creations community.

Following my post, RightasRain responded to my post, claiming I was somewhat out-of-date in the matter. This was a hard thing to verify, as at the time no official statement had come from Rezzable on the matter, other than vague platitudes from RightasRain that they may well review the situation.

Well, the good news is – and after I challenged RightasRain to put something in writing – it appears the decision has been made and it is the right one. Kudos go to Rezzable for this, and for RightasRain for putting it in writing – albeit 5 days after his comment on my blog.

Ensuring the permissions are maintained is, currently, the only means of coming close to “protecting” people’s own creations in Second Life – and it matters not whether illegal copying is always (to use RightasRain’s words) “gonna be out there”. If you want to put a capable tool out into the environment, then at least take the reasonable step of ensuring that the chances of it being abused are minimal.

Rezzable are now doing that – and while one could argue  that, whether they asked the question or not at the start, they could have averted the level of aggravation / concern shown by simply taking this step from the start – this is really now beside the point, and they should be congratulated for acting both wisely and positively in response to concerns if they are indeed to release the tool.

RightasRain should also be congratulated on clarifying points of concern within his post, as he does in his reply to Saffia Widdershin’s comment following the blog entry.

Do these steps elminate the risk of copy ripping – no. Do they put BuilderBot on a par with Second Inventory (which, to use RightasRain’s words, is used “without a lot of drama” simply because it does offer such protection) – then yes, and this is really what people wanted.

So again, kudos to Rezzable and RightasRain for taking the right steps.