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On Wednesday 19 March 2008 16:20:20 Robin Cornelius wrote: > > It is to the extent that they are treating the client as if it was > closed source and reverse engining the protocol as if the source was > not available. > > IS this a reasonable stance, or a paranoid one without good reason? > This is a paranoid stance with good reason :-) The problem is that even if someone doesn't intentionally copy code, they may do so unintentionally - they read the code that implements a particular feature in secondlife, and when implementing it in opensim they do it the same way, because they're subconsciously remembering what they saw. Similar policies are implemented elsewhere for the same reasons - for example if you've read OpenSolaris code (under Sun's CDDL license) you cannot contribute SPARC kernel code to Linux (under the GPL). This way of doing things is called a clean-room implementation - the idea being that in an ideal world you'd have one person in a room reading the secondlife code and describing how it works to someone in another room who's implementing the same features in opensim. As the person writing the opensim code never sees the secondlife code, there can be no claim that code was copied. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Regards, David. -- David Johnson www.david-web.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html