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Second Life Tries To Backpedal On the GPL
GigsVT writes "The Second Life viewer has been available under the GPL for three years. Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, recently released a 'third party viewer' policy that all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL. It includes such draconian measures as 'You agree to update or delete at our request any data that you have received from Second Life or our servers and systems using a Third-Party Viewer,' 'You must not mask IP or MAC addresses' (reported to the server), 'you must have a published privacy policy explaining your practices regarding user data,' and 'You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation.'"
These restrictions only apply if you want to list the viewer on Linden Lab's third party viewer listing on secondlife.com. You can still connect to Secondlife with any client you wish.
The items mentioned in the policy have NOTHING to do with the freedoms granted under the GPL. Draconican EULAs are par for the course in the online gaming world.
Read the last line before the Table of Contents: "If you do not comply, you are not allowed to use Second Life through a Third-Party Viewer, and in severe cases Linden Lab may terminate your access to Second Life entirely."
That's just not true. You have all the rights granted under the GPL. What you can't do is connect to their servers with a client that doesn't conform to their policies. That conforms to the GPL, and they don't have any choice in the matter anyway: people use modified SL viewers to grief and spam, and that's basically what they are trying to prohibit.
Even if you couldn't connect to their servers with a modified client at all, it would still be useful: Linden Labs also open sourced the server. So, if you like, you can connect with your client to your server, or anybody else's server who allows it.
Linden Labs didn't have to open source anything; they did the enlightened thing and open sourced both their client and their server code. One of the most popular viewer is now an open source viewer, with many more functions than their original viewer. And the grid of non-Linden Labs servers will probably grow to be bigger than their own, money-making grid some time this year or next year.
graphics that don't look like they're from the late '90s"
Hurray! Let's base our opinion of software from more than 5 years ago! http://secondlife.com/beta-viewer/
They need to do this because so much happens on the client side.
.NET code, you can change avatar scan distances and avatars in a scene, so with an individuals viewing distance also increased we see gross increases in bandwidth at the server side.
With the SL viewer and the Linden Lab servers, the relationship is somewhat like HTML javascript form verification with some but not complete server input cleansing. They have been expanding input checking at the server side but it is lagging behind.
If I could use a simplified example: The server sends to the viewer all avatars in a scene. A scene is a viewable distance which is 64 meters to 512 meters governed by the slider in your graphics preferences. The avatar scanner distance is hard-coded to a max of 16 avatars in the viewer. The scanner distance default is 96m. But some minor fiddling in the
Moving from that to the buzzwords of DRM and copyright laws(DMCA etc), the server sends the hash keys to the viewer of server assets(textures etc). It is somewhat trivial to match these keys to what it in RAM in form of a texture.
Simply put the Second Life viewer can be modified to be an indexer of Digital Works created by both Linden Labs and users.
This means LL has lost control of content, and it is content that gives Second Life a competitive advantage in 3D perpetual world games.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
They aren't backpedaling on the GPL at all. The code is still GPLed, and you can use it however you want, according to that license.
They do limit your ability to access their servers, and to list you in their pages as a recognized 3rd-party viewer - they have certain requirements for both, and they have now clarified those requirements. But that has nothing to do with the GPL, it's an entirely separate issue.
tl;dr: It's like Wordpress (the software) is GPLed, but Wordpress.com (the website with hosted blogs) won't let you write a blog on their website that links to malware etc.
While those may be all good and sound principles, they have nothing to do with this specific case of a (non-)violation of the GPL - which is a license, not an ethical/freedom/rights guideline.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Having lived in SL for more than 3 years this comes as no surprise. There were team of people writing viewers specifically for griefing and IP theft. As a example there was a viewer that had a "crash server button" and as such I do believe that this policy is well over due. https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2010/02/23/introducing-a-new-third-party-viewer-directory-and-policy
Unfortunately, no. The sources can no longer be licensed under GPL, because Linden's new policy conflicts with GPLv2's clause 6:
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
This is literal wording taken from the GPLv2 license, and is further reinforced in the GPLv2 FAQ.
Linden Lab is imposing massive further restrictions on developer recipients of their code, making it completely impossible for them to distribute the code without accepting those restrictions. This restriction of the ability to distribute code is not permitted by the GPL (of any version).
GPL cannot be used to grant fewer freedoms than the GPL specifies. That's a core term of the license.
The freedom to develop and distribute cannot be impeded while you license under the GPL.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra