SLGOGP Draft 1/Discuss 1 Structure

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Contribution agreement

META: this section "Contribution agreement" belongs in a separate Discuss area covering the top part of the document (above "Structure"), but since that part is not editable by mere mortals on the wiki, I'm placing it here.

The link to the Contributions Agreement is broken. For the same reason as stated above, I can't fix it.

It was stated during today's Office Hours that the Linden Project:Contributions Agreement was required for this protocol specification in order than the whole could be placed under single copyright for submission to standards bodies. The premise of that statement is inaccurate.

All text placed on this wiki is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, and its mere placement in the wiki conveys the right (and expectation) that it will be copied, modified, transformed, and often deleted. That is what wikis are about, their express goal and intent, and their standard M.O.. It is the wiki meme, a collaborative commons.

It follows from the above that a community-developed specification created through normal wiki processes provides a ready document that can be copied arbitrarily, and submitted to anyone for any purpose whatsoever, without requiring the agreement of any wiki contributor at all. This invalidates the premise that copyright assignment is required, although that by itself is not really harmful.

What *is* harmful is that, apparently as a result of the alleged requirement for copyright control, the protocol specification is not itself open to community modification by normal wiki processes. That premise is false, and therefore the access restriction is unjustified.

This protocol specification is a community effort at designing a protocol for a large system of interoperating 3rd party grids and worlds, not a specification for a Linden-exclusive protocol. It is therefore less than satisfactory for Lindens to control what may appear in that protocol, in an exclusive manner. While I like to believe in benevolent dictatorship, I am also realistic and I wish to express my concern at this arrangement, in case it does not work in a benevolent manner. A situation in which the protocol admits only those elements which suit Linden business interests would be extremely disappointing.

It would serve VW community purposes far better for this work to be fully open. Morgaine Dinova 13:26, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

Structure

The structure of this wiki page for the specification seems to be somewhat closed to community contribution:

The inability to modify the parent document destroys most of the utility of wikis.
Since our contributions can now only be made in the discussions sections, they become merely advisary, and hence will be mostly ignored.
This is not really a community approach to evolving a document, as it divides the AWG into Lindens with power over the document and minions with none, and so it does not encourage contributions.
The worst aspect of this by far however is that the protocol specification becomes the exclusive domain of Linden Labs, and not of the AWG. Since the document is not defining Second Life but is creating a generic interoperable protocol for all parties, it is inappropriate that this specification be under the sole control of Linden Labs. Morgaine Dinova 22:11, 11 March 2008 (PDT)

It has been suggested that the current structure is just a first-cut prototype. That's fine, but the above points stand, currently. Morgaine Dinova 13:27, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

Given the non-editable nature of the parent document, these Discuss areas alone are not enough, since by intent they will feature extended discussions between proponents rather than directly offer improved versions of the parent section. In effect, the collaborative wiki mechanism is degraded into pure expressions of opinion without any actual product. How about adding a Contrib link alongside each Discuss link, so that actual document content can be added by contributors as well, and eventually incorporated into the main section if it passes community scrutiny? Morgaine Dinova 14:34, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

Terminology

I think we should use the nomenclature of RFCs here as it makes quite clear what one has to implement and what is optional. Here is the sentence from the OAuth spec: The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119] (Bradner, B., “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels,” .). Domain name examples use [RFC2606] (Eastlake, D. and A. Panitz, “Reserved Top Level DNS Names,” .). TaoTakashi 09:13, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

a glossary might be very helpful, e.g. what is a client, a viewer, agent domain etc. TaoTakashi 09:15, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

External Links

Speaking as a AW Groupies member, it would be nice if some tiny section of the preamble pointed to the webpages that already exist that discuss this issue in broader terms (and/or in greater detail). My suggestinss are the AWG and AW_groupies pages since between them, they point to almost all other relevant parts of the wiki and to the outside organizations and groups that are working on SL-compatible projects: libsl, opensim, realXtend and openviewer. Saijanai 03:37, 1 April 2008 (PDT)