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On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:25 AM, David Johnson <dj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. There is a small technicality here. secondlife is a client and opensim is a server that are suppose to work together. They are not trying to replicate one with the other but rather inter-operate. There is some "common" code in the fact that 3D MMOLRPG's need to track physics on both client and server then compare notes ever so often. But i can't see the issue of looking at the client code to see what parameters it is expecting in a message in order to know how to send the message. > > 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). But in theory BSD and GPL should not be fighting at this level they are suppose to be compatible licenses. > > This way of doing things is called a clean-room implementation - the idea Yea and this is what they are doing. But in this case it seems to be hindering progress for everyone and now i am "tainted" and may never contribute to opensim. The real sad part of this is the message exchange on various lists went out of control and there was lots of anti GPL FUD, miss-understanding of each other, probably some anti BSD FUD too and the usual that always seems to happens in these cases. It almost seems like GPL and BSD are religions, parallels to different types of Christianity. We all believe in the same "basic" idea but non of us can get along with each other :-) Robin -- 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