rob-linden
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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.
MMOX standards at the 74th IETF
From 22 to 27 March this year in San Francisco, the 74th IETF meeting will take place in San Francisco. The IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force, a volunteer group responsible for the development and promotion of Internet standards, and while it represents just one of the cogs in the Internet's success and usability, it is fundamentally responsible for most of the interoperable network and communication protocols in use today. For this particular meeting's schedule, there's a new BoF waiting for approval. To be jointly chaired by Linden Lab and IBM, the MMOX BoF (loosely translated as Massive Multiplayer Online X -- where X stands for 'stuff' or 'experience', take your pick) is to tackle the preliminaries of virtual environment standards and interoperability mechanisms.
ION 08: Virtual worlds for the masses
What's a virtual world? Why do we even call them virtual worlds when we could easily call them digital worlds, or just simply, worlds? This was just one of the many interesting topics discussed at ION 08 this year in a panel entitled, "Redefining Virtual Worlds for Mass Markert Consumption" which is quite the mouthful. So lets put things in a more understandable -- and far more interesting -- perspective.Whether you're talking about Club Penguin, Gaia Online or Second Life the truth of the mater is that these "worlds" are here to stay and they all share similarities -- social interaction. Not only are they here to stay, but they've only just begun to grow as a market. Which is why this panel was all the more interesting. The panel includes Erik Bethke (GoPets Ltd), John K. Bates (Mindark/Entropia Universe), Craig Sherman (Gaia Online), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab/Second Life) and was moderated by David Elchoness (Association of Virtual Worlds).%Gallery-22798%
Second Life JIRA statistics site launches
A while back, Rob Linden was asking for volunteers to collect and compile periodic JIRA statistics. Jason Giglio took that idea "and kinda ran with it", producing the sljirastats website. JIRA, the issue tracker used by Linden Lab, is more or less frequently slammed for having a daunting interface. Realistically speaking, while it could probably stand some improvement if it is intended to be used by non-technical people (whether it is or not is in some doubt), it's no worse than most and better than quite a few.
Linden Lab releases key JIRA statistics, calls for volunteer
Linden Lab's Rob Lanphier, their "open source busybody" released some numbers from the Public JIRA issue-tracker today as part of an evaluation of ongoing bug reporting/triage evaluation for Second Life . In the 7 days from 24 October to 30 October (inclusive), 87 issues were filed into the public issue tracker. Of these issues, 1 was misfiled, 13 resolved (or fixed internally), 8 were imported into Linden Lab's internal issue tracker. 65 haven't gone anywhere.
