open-life
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Linden Lab's collective copyright conundrum
Over the last few months, there's been an increasing amount of talk about the modified Second Life viewer being used with Open Life Grid (a third-party virtual environment based on reverse-engineered and open-source systems and protocols). Most of the talk centers around copyright infringement -- or license violations, if you prefer. It's claimed that the operators of Open Life Grid are failing to comply with the source-code licenses (the GPL with FLOSS exceptions) under which the Second Life source code has been made available. Now, while the issue has been reported to Linden Lab's license-infringement hotline, the issue is actually a bit trickier for the Lab than it would first appear. You see, the viewer code contains contributions from a number of third-party contributors, each of which retains their copyright, intellectual property and rights to their contributions under the terms of the contribution agreement. All of whom have the right to commence their own actions.
An interview with Open Life's Steve Sima
The Metaverse Journal's Lowell Cremorne landed an interview with Steve Sima (aka Sakai Openlife), the founder of Australian-based Open Life grid - which, we note, is still apparently not quite working for new registrations - certainly, we've had no luck here - you can register, but not actually log in with it. Open Life currently operates on Open Simulator 0.5. Sima's plans involve full offline content creation (in fact, you can get a downloadable simulator from the website - though we don't believe the means exist to readily send that data anywhere as yet), and he is hotly anticipating the new viewer from RealXTend.
New non-Linden grid opening [updated]
Adam Zaius Quiplash announces the opening of Open Life, an alternative Second Life grid developed in conjunction with Finnish developer RealXtend (apparently the companies Admino and Ludocraft are in there somewhere too, but we're still a little hazy on the big picture [Did I mention we're a bit hazy? Pardon the dust]) - who have developed a custom viewer with additional features (like real 3D meshes instead of prims, python scripting, textures-via-HTTP, multiple attachment points per body part, and more) that are unsupported in Second Life currently. The new grid is going live in the next few hours, apparently, and it seems that everyone's invited. Open Life appears to be renting out simulators for $75US/month. We don't have a lot more information available to us right now, but it all looks very exciting , though reportedly there are stability issues that make the new grid only for the adventurous. [Update: Okay, this is a bit of a muddle, and we've put together a correction based on better information, check below the fold]
