Of Copybotters and Lawyers

Okay, now that I’ve got Wordpress MU working, it’s time for a short explanation as to what in the living fuck is going on.

Linden Lab decided to whip out their gnarly e-lawyer dicks and start making new policies geared towards eliminating certain undesirables.  They, of course, forgot that Neil and his ilk do not give a shit about policy and never will.  LL also made the mistake of pissing off opensource-dev in many, many, many ways, resulting in grid boycotts, viewer name changes (due to policies about having “life” in the name of the program), and generally being extremely stupid.  In fact, the 3PVP has become such a fucking monster that it has even managed to ban LL’s own viewer (you cannot export textures from the grid that you have not created, yet all LL viewers allow you to do so if the item is full-perms).

Although Soft Linden has stated that he’s getting LL’s lawyers to reconsider shit, they will not budge on the naming of FlexLife or RLV, since apparently they have copyrighted the word “Life” and all extensions.  Therefore, to avoid getting everyone remotely involved with FlexLife banned and sued, we’ve renamed the viewer to Luna and are now working towards relatively full 3PVP compliance.

There are several obstacles, however:

1. We are NOT going to be held liable for what you, the user, does with our application. That would be like suing Colt Firearms because some asshole took his hunting shotgun and blew some cop’s head off.  We’re protected by the GPL license agreement, but the 3PVP currently places responsibility solely on the developer.  Luna does not have any malicious stuff in it, so if anything bad happens, like your PC exploding and killing 50 people in an Internet Cafe, it’s your fucking problem.  Griefing is perpetuated by users.  This recent problem with the 3PVP also completely reverses Robin Linden’s statement about how viewers themselves are not bannable, users’ actions are.
2. We are NOT going to allow LL to demand your personal information.
3. We are NOT going to allow LL to force us to (not) develop stuff.
4. Linden Lab has no right to publicly display our personal information without prior consent.

All of those are pretty common sense, but Linden Lab has destroyed those common-sense rights in the current form of the 3rd Party Viewer Policy.

Therefore, we have the following ultimatum.

Ultimatum

Linden Lab hereby has until March 26th, 2010 to amend the 3rd Party Viewer Policy to:

1. Protect basic user and developer rights to privacy under U.S. and International Law.
2. Adhere to the Gnu General Public License version 2 (under which their own viewers are licensed).
3. Support developer immunity to user behavior/modifications (unless malicious developer intent is perceived).
4. Remove or amend Section 4a’s forced information update/removal clause. (Information we collect is our business, not yours, and we still have to comply with U.S. and International privacy law anyway.  Suggest removal and adding a “you present and warrant that information you collect on users is explained in your privacy policy and conforms to U.S./International privacy law. not liable etc”.)
5. Update section 2.c to allow for connection of 3rd Party apps that cannot obtain hardware information (such as OpenMetaverse or AJAXLife).

Failure to meet this deadline will result in a widespread boycott of all 3PVP-affected grids by participating viewers, meaning users will be forced to use the stock LL client to log in.  Participating viewers will only operate on OpenSim and non-LL grids.

Currently, only Luna is a part of the 3PVP ultimatum.  Feel free to sign on.