Marine, you raise a good question, but it's hard to give a reasonable answer to a "what if" question about a totally unreasonable TPV policy. :-)
The fact that the TPV document places the burden of liability for LL's own bugs (and many other things) on TPV developers' shoulders despite the extremely clear "NO WARRANTY" clauses of GPLv2, combined with Linden's refusal to discuss it further, just shows how totally beyond the bounds of reason this whole thing has become. The safest approach for TPV developers is probably to find a way to avoid falling under TPV liability at all. This is achieved by any of the 3 alternatives that I listed, all of which employ the simple strategy of relying on licenses that LL cannot overturn. Unfortunately it also means not using any new code released by LL after 30th April (not 1st April as I incorrectly stated). Developers can of course look at LL's post-April code, as the GPL always allows that, but copying their code would be very dangerous since that would bring their post-TPV rules on liability into effect, and the safety of the "NO WARRANTY" clauses then becomes a matter for debate. A genuine independent re-implementation of any new Linden code would be required to retain the "NO WARRANTY" granted by a pre-TPV GPL license, the more different the better. On the positive side, that's an opportunity for making TPV code better than LL's. :-) Note that none of this addresses how TPV developers can continue to exist in SL though, since LL could ban you for not agreeing to be bound by the TPV. The only thing that this strategy provides is a reasonable chance to be protected by the "NO WARRANTY" clauses of open licenses. Just in case some TPV developers here haven't heard, Imprudence developers have made an official announcement<http://imprudenceviewer.org/2010/03/26/an-important-announcement-regarding-the-third-party-viewer-policy/>listing in detail the reasons why they have to reject the TPV policy in order to be able to continue developing the viewer. It is very well reasoned, and is required reading for TPV developers. It needed the personal sacrifice of not developing for SL but for Opensim grids instead (thus escaping the "TPV" definition), and personally using only the Linden viewers when in SL. In exchange for this, the Imprudence developers are not subject to the TPV's outrageous conditions, particularly on personal liability. Any use of Imprudence in SL is then at the user's own risk and without placing liability on the developers. It's very sad that Linden Lab forces open source teams to these lengths. It's not in the spirit of open source at all. Indeed, the terms of the TPV are quite likely to be wholly non-compliant with the GPL as applied to TPV developers developing for SL. Morgaine. ======================== On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Marine Kelley <marinekel...@gmail.com>wrote: > Thank you for the heads up Morgaine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the > "no warranty" clause vanishes from the source code, then does that mean that > LL guarantees that the code of the original viewer is bug-free ? We can't > guarantee it as open source programmers if the original devs don't in the > first place, and they can't expect us to remove it ourselves afterwards, so > who is liable for the original defects if a law suit was started because of > an exploit ? >
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