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.

Continue reading Linden Lab's collective copyright conundrum

Linden Lab's collective copyright conundrum originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading MMOX standards at the 74th IETF

MMOX standards at the 74th IETF originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Gallery: ION 08: Game Conference gallery

Continue reading ION 08: Virtual worlds for the masses

ION 08: Virtual worlds for the masses originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 14 May 2008 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading Second Life JIRA statistics site launches

Second Life JIRA statistics site launches originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading Linden Lab releases key JIRA statistics, calls for volunteer

Linden Lab releases key JIRA statistics, calls for volunteer originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.