Sometimes you can’t help but sympathise with Linden Lab – to some degree. They must at times feel like they are trapped between a rock and hard place.
Last week the Third Party Viewer Policy rolled out – and caused everything from flag-waving to howls of despair.
On the one hand, people were happy to see the policy – warts and all – while on the other there were screams about it violating GPL and Creative Commons.
For myself, while I applaud LL for taking action, I was concerned over a number of aspects of the policy: the ambiguity expressed in some sections, etc.
Such was the storm of feedback received, Linden Lab did the right thing and started walking through the minefield of opposing views to try and nail down concerns and produce a policy that can do what needs to be done. While I had to smile at a reported comment from one Linden Lab employee, “Linden Lab has approached outside legal experts with your feedback, and one of these experts is a lawyer who specializes in open source license compliance issues.” *cough*, a shame this wasn’t done from the start – what we have here is an attempt by the Lab to produce a document that meets the demands of those worries about such things as data and content theft, honours the Lab’s own need to maintain the integrity of the grid and which avoids falling into a legal pothole around the issue of GPL / open source, etc.
In the interim, they’ve issued a FAQ to address many of the issues around the policy. Chief among the clarifications are:
- The policy applies to ALL Third Party Viewers wishing to connect to the grid, spelling out non compliance = no connection
- It “clarifies” concerns I personally had (as did many others, it seems), section 1h – inasmuch as by “clarifies” I mean Linden Lab are eliminating it from the policy.
- Matters around publishing personal data (real name, address) has been clarified. Real names and addresses must be supplied to Linden Lab, but do not have to be listed in the Directory.
These are all to the good. (1.) in particular is beneficial – the policy may have implied such – but it needs to state as much outright.
There is much more to be done – and it is going to be interesting to see what comes out of the current re-drafting of the Policy. However, these are pretty much moves in the right direction.
Whether this policy also spells the “end of saving full permission textures” remains to be seen. I rather suspect not, and that the argument being put forward that it does is both too narrow and too selective of specific phrases within the FAQ passages it points to. If nothing else, it’s a demonstration of my comment on LL being between a rock and a hard place; whatever they do on some matters, there will always be someone ready to start shouting “the sky is falling! the sky is falling!”. What’s more, even when LL react to such cries and revise their position – they still hear “the sky is falling!” being shouted across the forums – sometimes by the very individuals / groups that shouted for the change in the first place…
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 