Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Are you sure? The linked policy says, "This Policy governs access to Second Life and our technical platform that supports Second Life by any Third-Party Viewer or any third-party software client that logs into our servers." It looks like it's only section 6 that applies to "a Developer with a Third-Party Viewer that you would like to list in our Viewer Directory"; the rest seems to be a condition on any client that accesses Linden's servers.
That being said, I'm not sure that this is as egregious as the summary makes it sound. It seems mostly to amount to, "if you use a client to connect to our servers, that client must abide by our policies." Which doesn't seem all that unreasonable (Linden have the right to place conditions of use on access to their servers, even if some of the conditions are kind of wack), and certainly doesn't "all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL." First, there are plenty of modifications that could still be made without contravening Linden's terms of use; second, if you use their GPLed code to produce something that doesn't connect to their servers, you don't have to follow this policy at all. The only slightly dubious thing is that they do seem to want to restrict distribution of clients that could connect to their servers, even if they could also be used in other ways.
Linden Labs has not "backpedaled" on the GPL in any sense at all.
Linden generously donated a lot of code to GPL developers. They never promised to grant unlimited access to their servers.
There is really no cause for whining here. The community should be grateful to these guys.