Re: Gazira Babeli - first comprehensive survey of works in Second Life

Chris Rush wrote:

> In the spirit of opensource - Gazira has licensed much of her code

As the original author, Gazira doesn't have to license any of their
code. But if they do it is important that other users be free to use the
software effectively, so the complete code should be made available.

> via creative commons, and you can download it for your own us!

Licensing code using Creative Commons licenses is a very bad idea. They
are not designed for code, and Creative Commons do not recommend using
them for code. The GPL is much better for software.

If the code is GPL, when do modifications of Gazira's code made by other
users need to be released? Since Linden Scripting Language scripts run
on the Second Life server, just modifying and running the code on your
own objects or avatars probably means that no distribution has taken
place and so no modifications need to be released. *Unless* the modified
code is explicitly given to someone else, in which case distribution has
taken place but they have received the source code anyway.

The ability to exploit LSL scripts publicly while using the software
without distributing it means that the Affero licence might be better
for LSL scripts. The Affero license has been designed specifically to
tackle this kind of use, and it will be GPL-3 compatible.

Would running the script as part of a performance count as "public
performance of the work" as per the Creative Commons licenses? I
honestly don't know. If it does then this would work better than the GPL
to keep code public, but it might be better to still use Affero.

I appreciate that objects can be CC licensed in SL, but scripts on
objects should still be GPL-ed (or Affero-ed).

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

- Rob.